TOKYO —
When she meets people off campus, Junko Tsuchiyagaito, 23, does not usually let
on that she studies chemistry at the graduate level. She does not deliberately
withhold the information, but she does not volunteer it, either.
She said that Japanese women who studied the
humanities were seen as being more polished and attractive, especially at Aoyama Gakuin University, which is known
for its fashionable student body. “But the image of women in science is that of
someone whose hair is disheveled and who does not care about beauty. Men think
you are not cute.”
The widely shared perception that studying
science could be the kiss of death for a young Japanese woman’s romantic life
is one of several causes behind the low ratio of female students in science and
engineering departments.
According to the Ministry of Education,
Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, women accounted for 14 percent of the
science and engineering students at Japanese universities, even though they
represented 43 percent of college students over all, excluding medical and
agricultural schools. In the humanities, they make up 66 percent.
Voices are now growing within both government
and academia to rectify the imbalance.
“With the population shrinking, we need to
tap into women in order to generate capable engineers in the future,” said
Toshio Maruyama, executive vice president for education and international
affairs at the Tokyo Institute of Technology,
or TiTech, one of the leading science schools in Japan. “That is our common
perception.”
TiTech and other universities are pushing to
increase female enrollment by attracting high school girls and their parents
with science-themed fairs, workshops, campus tours and lab visits. Some send
young women currently enrolled in science and technology courses across the
country as ambassadors.
The topic of women entering these fields has
suddenly become fashionable. They even have a nickname: “Rikejo,” roughly
meaning “science women.” Publishers print magazines for young women interested
in science, and there is even a novel about a “mathematics girl.”
Masao Togami, editor of Rikejo magazine, a free publication with
17,000 subscribers, said he wanted to give young women encouragement, career
tips and a vision for the future. “Universities have been strengthening efforts
to recruit more female students,” Mr. Togami said. “That’s clearly evident just
in the last few years.”
“Rikejo fairs” aimed at high school girls
have become popular. When TiTech announced campus and lab tours online last
year, the slot for about 30 students “was gone in one minute,” said a
university official. “We wish we could let in more.”
The tide turned around 2008, when the
government began subsidized programs to support scientific research conducted
by female scientists and increased funding to help universities employ more of
them, said Ginko Kawano, associate professor of social education at Yamagata University.
The government is especially concerned that
only 13 percent of Japanese scholars and researchers are women, which is a
lower proportion than in Europe, the United States and South Korea. In the
science fields in Japan, that percentage falls to almost half of that figure;
it is only about 2 percent in engineering.
Many university science departments,
particularly those in the countryside, are trying to recruit more young women,
some even frantically. “Many universities cannot fill their capacity because youth
population is declining,” Ms. Kawano said. “So they are turning to the
population segment that was previously not thought to be their customers:
women.”
Female students, some professors say, perform
better academically and also have an easier time finding jobs after graduation.
Miki Hasegawa, a chemistry professor at
Aoyama Gakuin University’s campus in Sagamihara, a city near Tokyo, said men
might have solid academic records in grades and test scores, “but the ones with
sprouting talents and abilities often are women.”
“In our field, a little bit of playfulness
and risk taking is necessary to succeed. In that sense, women are more flexible
and daring.”
But the notion that science and engineering
are not for women, and that studying these fields could wreak havoc on their
love lives, runs deep.
When Naoto Ohtake, now an engineering
professor at TiTech, began studying there in 1982, “There were zero females,
and it had been historically zero throughout its 100-year history,” he said.
“The notion was that touching machines wasn’t for ladies.” Today, about 6
percent of TiTech’s mechanical engineering students are women.
Mr. Togami of Rikejo magazine said that some
saw these women as being too intellectually intimidating for Japanese men.
“Scientific women are thought to be smart, logical and cannot be easily
fooled,” he said.
“Men don’t like it when women defeat their
arguments in a logical way,” said Ai Takaoka, 23, who studies ecological
science at Tokyo Metropolitan
University. A fellow science major, Naoko Kono, 21, noted that Japanese men
wanted girlfriends who followed their lead. “They like ladies who have a soft
character and are agreeable,” she said.
Female science majors often struggle with
their identity. “People often say to me that I am like a man,” Ms. Takaoka
said. “But we are trained this way, to be logical and to find truths.”
Mayuko Fukushima, 22, a chemistry graduate
student at Aoyama Gakuin University, said that after adjusting to a lab
environment where men and women go about their research in the same way, she
felt conflicted about how to present herself outside the classroom.
“When humanities girls visit the lab, I feel
annoyed, but at the same time, I feel inferior” for not being seen as being as
feminine, she said.
When she is out on the weekends, she enjoys
what are seen as typical pursuits for a young woman. “I find it therapeutic
when I am choosing girly clothes at stores and sending e-mails with cute
characters.”
Hitomi Hayashibara, a graduate student of
organic and synthetic chemistry at Tokyo Metropolitan University, said that
having a higher degree in a scientific field could stand as a barrier to
marriage, particularly if the man is seen as being less educated or of a lower
social status. She has an understanding boyfriend but added that “I would think
most men would not like that.”
Chisaki Yamada, a chemistry student at Aoyama
Gakuin University, said that studying science felt natural to her, partly
because her father and brother also studied science. She had an easy time
befriending male colleagues because “we can both speak the common language, the
language of logic.”
She makes a nod to her girlish side by
pairing her white lab coat with pink sandals with polka-dotted bows. “It’s
difficult to behave like a girl in the lab because you have to carry heavy
equipment and stuff,” she said. “But wearing this makes me feel good. I get to
express my femininity somehow.”
Attempts at raising the number of women come
against legal barriers, underpinned by social mores and cultural forces. In
2010, faculty members of the Kyushu
University mathematics department concluded that a more proactive
admissions policy might be needed to recruit more women. The number of female
students was only in the single digits, out of a student body of more than 50.
So the faculty decided to set up a quota. The
first group of 45 students selected would be done regardless of gender. But, in
the second group, the department would admit at least five women out of nine
slots. Ultimately, that meant a quota that guaranteed a minimum of only 5 women
in 54 total places.
But months after the announcement was made,
calls and e-mails poured in criticizing what was seen as “reverse
discrimination” and the breaking of the “equality before the law” principle,
said Masanobu Kaneko, dean of the department.
“They claimed it would be unconstitutional,
violating Article 14 that guaranteed equality of gender before the law,” he
said. “We realized that this could lead to a lawsuit,” possibly by male
applicants who failed to get in.
“If we lost the case, it could result in
irrecoverable damage” to the school’s reputation and cause problems for those
who were admitted, Dr. Kaneko said.
On the advice of lawyers and constitutional
scholars, the faculty decided that they could lose such a lawsuit. Baffled,
they gave up the idea.
“The notion of fairness here is different.
People tend to think narrowly about it,” said Ms. Kawano of Yamagata
University, adding that affirmative action programs might be necessary because
“women are struggling against social discrimination.”
In the Japanese education system, girls in
primary and middle school face little discrimination, experts said.
“Up to that level, students’ math scores are
known to be about the same between boys and girls,” Dr. Kaneko said. Social
considerations get into the way when they enter high school.
There, career counselors often shepherd
female students away from science tracks “out of motherly concern,” Ms. Kawano
added.
Parents might also guide their daughters away
from science.
Kumiko Kushiyama, a professor of industrial
art and systems design at Tokyo Metropolitan University, said that Japanese
mothers still had much control over their daughters, with notions of what young
women should or should not do.
That said, modern Japanese mothers — and
society in general — are becoming more open-minded.
“Our female students are very energetic and
doing great,” she said. “And they find good jobs.”