7 ms·

Japanese Medical School Deducted Points from Exam Scores of Female Applicants

92 points by srameshc 8y ago

devoply 8y ago
> "it was concerned that a large increase in the number of women posed a serious problem for the future of the university hospital, because female doctors tend to quit after marrying or starting families."
- curiousgal 8y ago
  Japan does have a rapidly declining population because of the extremely low fertility rates and the increasrd aging putting its workforce into welfare reliance. I suppose desperate times call for desperate measures?
  - Reyes33 8y ago
    There is always the alternative to die out. In the face of that a little influencing does not seem so bad at all.
  - komali2 8y ago
    Desperate measures would be the government establishing, using the scientific method, that yes indeed there is a birth rate problem that is severe enough to justify drastic action, and then establishing an actual effective solution that did not inequally infringe on citizen rights. If this article is an acceptable form of desperate measures, I think an equivalent would be Exxon deciding there are too many rich black people, and thus paying black engineers less. (private organization using unfounded information to take an action that doesn't make any sense outside the generally accepted social contract)
  - astura 8y ago
    >"Instead of worrying about women quitting jobs, they should do more to create an environment where women can keep working," Maeda said in a statement, according to The Associated Press. "And we need working style reform, which is not just to prevent overwork deaths, but to create a workplace where everyone can perform to the best of their ability regardless of gender."
    - kansface 8y ago
      Sure, but only one of the two options is available to the people who are actually making the decision.
      - Sangermaine 8y ago
        Somehow I doubt that this medical school has already implemented or tried every robust maternity leave, childcare, or other family support policy that would address their concerns about female doctors being forced to choose between quitting or having a family, and so the school simply has no other options left but to secretly deduct points from female applicants.
  - kaitai 8y ago
    Being a mother in Japan can be miserable. You must give up everything you ever loved and confine yourself to a small apartment and a local park. You're no longer allowed to be an intellectual being or a participant in public life. Women don't want it, because women are people, human beings who want to live a full life. If having a child is the end of your life, it's not a good bargain for many women. The US is deeply imperfect -- but no one will tell you that having had a child you can never, ever go back to your profession.
- viraptor 8y ago
  To put it in a slightly different context: part of the change is that women actually get to be doctors before starting families, and maybe after. This was not as common before due to birth control pill being accepted in Japan only in 1999! It changed the view for the recent generation a bit.
- boomboomsubban 8y ago
  If you read the various sources linked, they don't have any reliable data showing this is happening, just "a strong sense" that it is the case. Without basing the decision on evidence, it's just another example in a long list of things medical professionals had a "strong sense" women can't handle.
  - flocial 8y ago
    And you're responding with your "strong sense" without considering that Japan might be different. In Japan, around 60% of women quit their jobs after having their first child [1]. In a country that still frowns on "job hopping" and still clings to the outdated notion of lifetime employment in one company, many of these women are unable to re-enter the workforce in anything other than menial part-time work. It's not just the systemic gender discrimination but the fact that women in Japan aren't given a chance to balance careers with marriage/children is what's made this such a sensational story. 1. https://www.works-i.com/column/panelsurveys/%E8%90%A9%E5%8E%9F%E7%89%A7%E5%AD%90/ https://www.works-i.com/column/panelsurveys/%E8%90%A9%E5%8E%...
- czep 8y ago
  > "it was concerned that a large increase in the number of women posed a serious problem for the future of the university hospital, because female doctors tend to quit after marrying or starting families." And I've got a bridge in Brooklyn for you. This is the sort of prestigious medical school where sons and grandsons and nephews of wealthy families are expected to be able to graduate. When too many of them were suddenly not being admitted because smarter, harder-working women were outclassing them on their exams, the admissions department needed to "calibrate" the superior scores of the female applicants in order to maintain a healthy stream of legacy revenue.
- nv-vn 8y ago
  I don't know how much of this is just the administration trying to come up with an excuse for their behavior, but this seems to say a lot about Japanese culture. In the West, discrimination was historically used to raise one above others and reinforce hierarchy. This behavior displays another very different, though equally abhorrent, practice. Japan's particular strain of collectivism is discriminating in order to create some perceived advantage for the country as a whole. Compare with American segregation, where a black person living near white people was seen as morally backwards because of the belief in racial superiority and hierarchy. This specific instance poses a more concerning behavior to me, because the people in question here did not think about discriminating in order to serve themselves; they were convinced that they were doing something good for everybody. Though attitudes have changed in Japan about gender, it seems like this will be something that will take a long time to go away because people don't only need to rationalize their discrimination, but instead they are convinced that they need to continue it as some kind of protection against societal issues even if they do (on the surface) believe in equality.
oh_sigh 8y ago
Isn't this what we effectively do in America with affirmative action?
- krapp 8y ago
  No.
- nailer 8y ago
  It's similar, but the bias here is against women having children and the effect is applied against the test output. In the US the most severe cases have been things like Harvard deciding there too many Asian people and creating a 'personality test' specifically designed to have Asians perform lower, ie modifying the test itself.
  - curiousgal 8y ago
    Potato potato. They could modify the test by adding the question "What is your gender?" where the only correct answer is "male", à la "literacy tests" in the US.
- astura 8y ago
  No. The "points system" has specifically been ruled unconstitutional. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratz_v._Bollinger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratz_v._Bollinger
  - oh_sigh 8y ago
    I said "effectively". There are other ways of implementing a racially discriminatory policy than explicitly adding 20 points for minorities. Let me put it this way: Tokyo Medical University was rejecting women who it would have accepted if all other things were equivalent except their reported gender was male. Don't some US universities do that with Affirmative Action? Reject Asians or whites that it would have accepted if all other things were equal except their reported race was black?
    - 8y ago
zdw 8y ago
From the doctors I know, there are far more women than men working less than 40 hours a week (for what passes for full/part time in the medical industry, which can have some heinous working hours in any situation). I attribute this to the following metric - if you're in a career where even part time work is >100k USD a year, having free time soon becomes more valuable than extra money. Women seem to understand this, or at least aren't stuck in the "your job is your life" rut to burnoutville that many men get stuck in. It seems like the solution here is "get more doctors through medical school if some want to work part time", but instead they came up with this discriminatory solution.
- oh_sigh 8y ago
  Do you know doctors in Japan? There may be a strong cultural element at play here.
- ramblerouser 8y ago
  Why is having more female doctors preferable to more medical services in total? This seems like sentimentality getting in the way of a functioning medical system. I suspect that many here denouncing the Japanese goal of improving their medical system would defend the vague and unsupported "improve campus culture" goal for why women in the West get affirmative action.
  - sudosteph 8y ago
    > Why is having more female doctors preferable to more medical services in total? This is a false dichotomy. They would have more medical services overall if they simply admitted the right amount of female applicants and then expand their training programs overall so that the less-qualified male applicants who are currently getting preferential treatment can simply train elsewhere to become doctors. Sure some female doctors might work less, but some won't, and there would still be more qualified medical professionals in the field overall.
    - ramblerouser 8y ago
      I don't think you understand what a false dichotomy is. Yes. Training more doctors would mean having more doctors. But for any number of doctors trained, why not prefer to train people more likely to put their skills to good use for society?
topkai22 8y ago
The most surprising number in article is that the US % of female doctors in only 34%. The percent of med school grads has been near 50% for at least 15 years. I couldn’t find numbers going back further then that, so there must be a very large historical imbalance clearing out or a real career dropout problem. I suspect the former, but still.
- rectang 8y ago
  Don't underestimate structural pregnancy discrimination. One half of the parenting pair finds the deck stacked against them when children arrive.
  - epicureanideal 8y ago
    Is it necessarily discrimination, or might there be other explanations? For example, maybe it's discriminatory social expectations of men to be breadwinners, so they're forced to work at really hard jobs like being doctors while their wives can make a free choice to stay home with the kids. I don't intend this reply to support either view. I'm just saying, discrimination is not necessarily the reason, and even if discrimination is the reason, there are two sides to that coin.
    - rectang 8y ago
      Harmful gender stereotypes are a negative for all of us together, for sure. See for example, your own gendered language on who does the "hard job" and who makes a "free choice".
      - epicureanideal 8y ago
        I specifically created a gendered counterexample to show the problem. I'm very much aware of the gendered use of language in my intentional counterexample.
        deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
leigha 8y ago
Has any country come up with a suitable solution to the issue of maintaining a career before, during and after pregnancy for women? I know many countries have paid maternity leave (usually paltry) and some organizations will hold the job while they are away. Is this good enough? If the issue is dropout because women are forced to make a decision between career and caring for/watching their child grow surely we can come up with a better solution?
- beisner 8y ago
  In my mind, the root of the problem is that companies haven’t figured out a way (or refuse to figure out a way) to buck the 9-5pm, 5-day, butt-in-seat workday policy. At the extreme case, if people could choose exactly which hours in a week they wished to work, completely independently of the company or team or anything, and perform that work anywhere they’d like, this wouldn’t be an issue. Women could take whatever time off they need to physically deliver a baby, and people in the family could arrange their working hours in such a way that all adults involved could agree on a preferred work/parent schedule that maintains whatever level of employment the adults desire. With 9-5 this doesn’t work. Remote work helps alleviate some of these issues, but not all. There need to be organizational innovations to make this happen.
  - dbcurtis 8y ago
    In my experience, employers are much more flexible than the state employment department and the health insurance companies. Ask to work 4 ten hour days, for instance instead of 5x8. The state will force the employer to pay overtime for the hours past 8 in a day.
  - leigha 8y ago
    I have noticed a trend of entrepreneurship amongst women I know that have babies and young kids. They are essentially creating jobs for themselves that work around these constraints you mention. They seem fulfilled and happy with this because it works best for the work/life balance. But most of them had a safety net that allowed them to start these endeavours in the first place. Perhaps one solution is to offer a safety net i.e. grant, incubator, accelerator etc. for women in this position that allows them to create the job that works best for them? I suppose not everyone is cut out for it but this will at least encourage some.
Proven 8y ago
If you give all non-white applicants extra points that is like deducting points from white applicants. Or females. This practice is whidespread in the US. Why is this news?
dzink 8y ago
The article talks about Japanese discriminating against female candidates for medical training. There are likely high workhour requirements and poor childcare support systems / cultural norms against childcare done by non-parents that can be fixed to address this problem. Regarding US training bottlenecks. Speaking of specialties more than general Doctor positions, it takes a certain number of cases per year to train a doctor and to sustain the skills of doctors that require specialized hand skills (surgeons of any kind, ortho etc). Those skills are perishable and many hospitals get lower number of cases of certain types than needed to sustain multiple good surgeons. For example, you wouldn’t want to go to a doc that does less than 4 Whipples per year if you need a Whipple. The bottleneck in training docs is the number of cases in the US in each specialty.
koosnel 8y ago
Where I live this is done based on race and it's not even a scandal, it's government policy.
- selimthegrim 8y ago
  And where is this?
  - koosnel 8y ago
    South Africa
dspillett 8y ago
Plain text (fast, low bandwidth, no tracking) article: https://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=634936967 https://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=634936967
todd8 8y ago
Medical schools fill an important role with limited training and teaching resources. I suspect they would be loath to admit someone that was planning to work as an MD for only one year after graduation. Women, of course work as doctors for more that a single year, but on average they do work less over their lifetimes than male physicians. For a number of reasons, female physicians don’t work as much over their careers as men statistically. I’m guessing that this is why med schools might practice this unsavory discrimination against women. It’s really unfair to individuals that might or might not go on to make more important contributors to the field than the average male doctor. I was married to a brilliant woman that went to medical school at a time when there was much more overt sexism in the field. Her abilities were unusual; she was always near the top of her class, and in a field like medicine this provided some protection from prejudice. However, women shouldn’t have to be better than their colleagues to simply survive medical training. Personally, about half my doctors are now female and I’m very happy with them.
- deviationblue 8y ago
  > Women, of course work as doctors for more that a single year, but on average they do work less over their lifetimes than male physicians. What data supports this statement, or is it good old fashion common sense and gut instinct?

92 points by srameshc 8y ago

> "it was concerned that a large increase in the number of women posed a serious problem for the future of the university hospital, because female doctors tend to quit after marrying or starting families."

curiousgal 8y ago
Japan does have a rapidly declining population because of the extremely low fertility rates and the increasrd aging putting its workforce into welfare reliance. I suppose desperate times call for desperate measures?
- Reyes33 8y ago
  There is always the alternative to die out. In the face of that a little influencing does not seem so bad at all.
- komali2 8y ago
  Desperate measures would be the government establishing, using the scientific method, that yes indeed there is a birth rate problem that is severe enough to justify drastic action, and then establishing an actual effective solution that did not inequally infringe on citizen rights. If this article is an acceptable form of desperate measures, I think an equivalent would be Exxon deciding there are too many rich black people, and thus paying black engineers less. (private organization using unfounded information to take an action that doesn't make any sense outside the generally accepted social contract)
- astura 8y ago
  >"Instead of worrying about women quitting jobs, they should do more to create an environment where women can keep working," Maeda said in a statement, according to The Associated Press. "And we need working style reform, which is not just to prevent overwork deaths, but to create a workplace where everyone can perform to the best of their ability regardless of gender."
  - kansface 8y ago
    Sure, but only one of the two options is available to the people who are actually making the decision.
    - Sangermaine 8y ago
      Somehow I doubt that this medical school has already implemented or tried every robust maternity leave, childcare, or other family support policy that would address their concerns about female doctors being forced to choose between quitting or having a family, and so the school simply has no other options left but to secretly deduct points from female applicants.
- kaitai 8y ago
  Being a mother in Japan can be miserable. You must give up everything you ever loved and confine yourself to a small apartment and a local park. You're no longer allowed to be an intellectual being or a participant in public life. Women don't want it, because women are people, human beings who want to live a full life. If having a child is the end of your life, it's not a good bargain for many women. The US is deeply imperfect -- but no one will tell you that having had a child you can never, ever go back to your profession.
viraptor 8y ago
To put it in a slightly different context: part of the change is that women actually get to be doctors before starting families, and maybe after. This was not as common before due to birth control pill being accepted in Japan only in 1999! It changed the view for the recent generation a bit.
boomboomsubban 8y ago
If you read the various sources linked, they don't have any reliable data showing this is happening, just "a strong sense" that it is the case. Without basing the decision on evidence, it's just another example in a long list of things medical professionals had a "strong sense" women can't handle.
- flocial 8y ago
  And you're responding with your "strong sense" without considering that Japan might be different. In Japan, around 60% of women quit their jobs after having their first child [1]. In a country that still frowns on "job hopping" and still clings to the outdated notion of lifetime employment in one company, many of these women are unable to re-enter the workforce in anything other than menial part-time work. It's not just the systemic gender discrimination but the fact that women in Japan aren't given a chance to balance careers with marriage/children is what's made this such a sensational story. 1. https://www.works-i.com/column/panelsurveys/%E8%90%A9%E5%8E%9F%E7%89%A7%E5%AD%90/ https://www.works-i.com/column/panelsurveys/%E8%90%A9%E5%8E%...
czep 8y ago
> "it was concerned that a large increase in the number of women posed a serious problem for the future of the university hospital, because female doctors tend to quit after marrying or starting families." And I've got a bridge in Brooklyn for you. This is the sort of prestigious medical school where sons and grandsons and nephews of wealthy families are expected to be able to graduate. When too many of them were suddenly not being admitted because smarter, harder-working women were outclassing them on their exams, the admissions department needed to "calibrate" the superior scores of the female applicants in order to maintain a healthy stream of legacy revenue.
nv-vn 8y ago
I don't know how much of this is just the administration trying to come up with an excuse for their behavior, but this seems to say a lot about Japanese culture. In the West, discrimination was historically used to raise one above others and reinforce hierarchy. This behavior displays another very different, though equally abhorrent, practice. Japan's particular strain of collectivism is discriminating in order to create some perceived advantage for the country as a whole. Compare with American segregation, where a black person living near white people was seen as morally backwards because of the belief in racial superiority and hierarchy. This specific instance poses a more concerning behavior to me, because the people in question here did not think about discriminating in order to serve themselves; they were convinced that they were doing something good for everybody. Though attitudes have changed in Japan about gender, it seems like this will be something that will take a long time to go away because people don't only need to rationalize their discrimination, but instead they are convinced that they need to continue it as some kind of protection against societal issues even if they do (on the surface) believe in equality.

oh_sigh 8y ago

Isn't this what we effectively do in America with affirmative action?

krapp 8y ago
No.
nailer 8y ago
It's similar, but the bias here is against women having children and the effect is applied against the test output. In the US the most severe cases have been things like Harvard deciding there too many Asian people and creating a 'personality test' specifically designed to have Asians perform lower, ie modifying the test itself.
- curiousgal 8y ago
  Potato potato. They could modify the test by adding the question "What is your gender?" where the only correct answer is "male", à la "literacy tests" in the US.
astura 8y ago
No. The "points system" has specifically been ruled unconstitutional. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratz_v._Bollinger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratz_v._Bollinger
- oh_sigh 8y ago
  I said "effectively". There are other ways of implementing a racially discriminatory policy than explicitly adding 20 points for minorities. Let me put it this way: Tokyo Medical University was rejecting women who it would have accepted if all other things were equivalent except their reported gender was male. Don't some US universities do that with Affirmative Action? Reject Asians or whites that it would have accepted if all other things were equal except their reported race was black?
  - 8y ago

zdw 8y ago

From the doctors I know, there are far more women than men working less than 40 hours a week (for what passes for full/part time in the medical industry, which can have some heinous working hours in any situation). I attribute this to the following metric - if you're in a career where even part time work is >100k USD a year, having free time soon becomes more valuable than extra money. Women seem to understand this, or at least aren't stuck in the "your job is your life" rut to burnoutville that many men get stuck in. It seems like the solution here is "get more doctors through medical school if some want to work part time", but instead they came up with this discriminatory solution.

oh_sigh 8y ago
Do you know doctors in Japan? There may be a strong cultural element at play here.
ramblerouser 8y ago
Why is having more female doctors preferable to more medical services in total? This seems like sentimentality getting in the way of a functioning medical system. I suspect that many here denouncing the Japanese goal of improving their medical system would defend the vague and unsupported "improve campus culture" goal for why women in the West get affirmative action.
- sudosteph 8y ago
  > Why is having more female doctors preferable to more medical services in total? This is a false dichotomy. They would have more medical services overall if they simply admitted the right amount of female applicants and then expand their training programs overall so that the less-qualified male applicants who are currently getting preferential treatment can simply train elsewhere to become doctors. Sure some female doctors might work less, but some won't, and there would still be more qualified medical professionals in the field overall.
  - ramblerouser 8y ago
    I don't think you understand what a false dichotomy is. Yes. Training more doctors would mean having more doctors. But for any number of doctors trained, why not prefer to train people more likely to put their skills to good use for society?

topkai22 8y ago

The most surprising number in article is that the US % of female doctors in only 34%. The percent of med school grads has been near 50% for at least 15 years. I couldn’t find numbers going back further then that, so there must be a very large historical imbalance clearing out or a real career dropout problem. I suspect the former, but still.

rectang 8y ago
Don't underestimate structural pregnancy discrimination. One half of the parenting pair finds the deck stacked against them when children arrive.
- epicureanideal 8y ago
  Is it necessarily discrimination, or might there be other explanations? For example, maybe it's discriminatory social expectations of men to be breadwinners, so they're forced to work at really hard jobs like being doctors while their wives can make a free choice to stay home with the kids. I don't intend this reply to support either view. I'm just saying, discrimination is not necessarily the reason, and even if discrimination is the reason, there are two sides to that coin.
  - rectang 8y ago
    Harmful gender stereotypes are a negative for all of us together, for sure. See for example, your own gendered language on who does the "hard job" and who makes a "free choice".
    - epicureanideal 8y ago
      I specifically created a gendered counterexample to show the problem. I'm very much aware of the gendered use of language in my intentional counterexample.
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]

leigha 8y ago

Has any country come up with a suitable solution to the issue of maintaining a career before, during and after pregnancy for women? I know many countries have paid maternity leave (usually paltry) and some organizations will hold the job while they are away. Is this good enough? If the issue is dropout because women are forced to make a decision between career and caring for/watching their child grow surely we can come up with a better solution?

beisner 8y ago
In my mind, the root of the problem is that companies haven’t figured out a way (or refuse to figure out a way) to buck the 9-5pm, 5-day, butt-in-seat workday policy. At the extreme case, if people could choose exactly which hours in a week they wished to work, completely independently of the company or team or anything, and perform that work anywhere they’d like, this wouldn’t be an issue. Women could take whatever time off they need to physically deliver a baby, and people in the family could arrange their working hours in such a way that all adults involved could agree on a preferred work/parent schedule that maintains whatever level of employment the adults desire. With 9-5 this doesn’t work. Remote work helps alleviate some of these issues, but not all. There need to be organizational innovations to make this happen.
- dbcurtis 8y ago
  In my experience, employers are much more flexible than the state employment department and the health insurance companies. Ask to work 4 ten hour days, for instance instead of 5x8. The state will force the employer to pay overtime for the hours past 8 in a day.
- leigha 8y ago
  I have noticed a trend of entrepreneurship amongst women I know that have babies and young kids. They are essentially creating jobs for themselves that work around these constraints you mention. They seem fulfilled and happy with this because it works best for the work/life balance. But most of them had a safety net that allowed them to start these endeavours in the first place. Perhaps one solution is to offer a safety net i.e. grant, incubator, accelerator etc. for women in this position that allows them to create the job that works best for them? I suppose not everyone is cut out for it but this will at least encourage some.

Proven 8y ago

If you give all non-white applicants extra points that is like deducting points from white applicants. Or females. This practice is whidespread in the US. Why is this news?

dzink 8y ago

The article talks about Japanese discriminating against female candidates for medical training. There are likely high workhour requirements and poor childcare support systems / cultural norms against childcare done by non-parents that can be fixed to address this problem. Regarding US training bottlenecks. Speaking of specialties more than general Doctor positions, it takes a certain number of cases per year to train a doctor and to sustain the skills of doctors that require specialized hand skills (surgeons of any kind, ortho etc). Those skills are perishable and many hospitals get lower number of cases of certain types than needed to sustain multiple good surgeons. For example, you wouldn’t want to go to a doc that does less than 4 Whipples per year if you need a Whipple. The bottleneck in training docs is the number of cases in the US in each specialty.

koosnel 8y ago

Where I live this is done based on race and it's not even a scandal, it's government policy.

selimthegrim 8y ago
And where is this?
- koosnel 8y ago
  South Africa

dspillett 8y ago

Plain text (fast, low bandwidth, no tracking) article: https://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=634936967 https://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=634936967

todd8 8y ago

Medical schools fill an important role with limited training and teaching resources. I suspect they would be loath to admit someone that was planning to work as an MD for only one year after graduation. Women, of course work as doctors for more that a single year, but on average they do work less over their lifetimes than male physicians. For a number of reasons, female physicians don’t work as much over their careers as men statistically. I’m guessing that this is why med schools might practice this unsavory discrimination against women. It’s really unfair to individuals that might or might not go on to make more important contributors to the field than the average male doctor. I was married to a brilliant woman that went to medical school at a time when there was much more overt sexism in the field. Her abilities were unusual; she was always near the top of her class, and in a field like medicine this provided some protection from prejudice. However, women shouldn’t have to be better than their colleagues to simply survive medical training. Personally, about half my doctors are now female and I’m very happy with them.

deviationblue 8y ago
> Women, of course work as doctors for more that a single year, but on average they do work less over their lifetimes than male physicians. What data supports this statement, or is it good old fashion common sense and gut instinct?