High Risk, No Reward: Unpacking Gender Disparities at Japanese Universities

When Fumiya Uchikoshi first arrived at the elite University of Tokyo, he was struck by two things: everyone seemed to already know each other, and there were hardly any women. The first was because many of the students came from the same top local high schools and quickly established themselves at the center of the university social scene. The second, however, nagged at him for years. His high school had an equal balance of boys and girls. Where had all the women gone?

Uchikoshi is now an Academy Scholar at The Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies at the Weatherhead Center, with a PhD from Princeton University. He works on social stratification and family demography in contemporary Japan and East Asia and has published in multiple journals of sociology and demography. While he has studied the many ways in which Japan perpetuates gender and educational inequalities, until recently he thought his lingering question about gender distribution at the University of Tokyo—with its focus on a small, privileged group—was too narrowly focused. At Princeton, however, he found that undergraduates taking his courses were interested in the topic, leading him to revisit what he’d observed as a student. He learned that the gender split at Todai (a popular nickname for University of Tokyo) hadn’t changed since his time there. “That was when I realized again that this is such an important issue,” says Uchikoshi. “I felt comfortable pursuing this topic more than before.” 

Since his high school was evenly split, but his Todai class was an overwhelming 80 percent men, Uchikoshi hypothesized that the national university entrance exam would provide measurable data on whether women were not applying or not passing. A first look at the data actually showed that there wasn’t a significant gender difference in attending nonelite universities in the year immediately after high school graduation. Uchikoshi then looked at elite/national schools, and drilled down to see who was retaking the entrance exam the following year, a common practice since first-time failure rates are so high. Here he found a difference that could possibly contribute to the gender disparity at Todai and other elite universities: more than a third of men chose to retake the exam while only one-in-seven women did. Students were more likely to pass on the second try after a year devoted to studying—so by opting out, the female students were foregoing their opportunity to attend top-level schools.  With this finding, Uchikoshi conducted more research, including interviews with almost 200 high school students and teachers, to get a picture of why retaking the exam was so unpopular for women and girls. 

Japan is well known as one of the least gender-equitable countries in the developed world. On the gender inequality index by the World Economic Forum, Japan is one of the lowest ranked of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries. Women have very low representation in government—less than 10 percent—and low participation in managerial positions in the labor market. However, even with that information, the breakdown of women in the University of Tokyo is still a dramatic 20 percent to men’s 80 percent. 

Japan is defying the worldwide trend of women making up half or even the majority of students at top colleges. For example, China’s elite universities have gender parity. In the last twenty-five years, South Korea went from a similar gender disparity to near equality. Schools in Europe and the United States are equal or majority women. Yet somehow Japan’s top national universities remain at only one-fifth women. Since the elite national universities are feeder schools for government bureaucratic jobs—especially in the Ministry of Finance, which is seen as a gateway into Japanese politics—women’s underrepresentation in civic roles continues. With women stuck at a 5–10 percent share of political positions, Uchikoshi observes, “Oftentimes, when the new cabinet is organized, they have a group photo. And then you can only see just a few or zero women in about thirty ministers. And then, every time they take a picture, they basically tell that it's a man's field.”

The disparity is so ingrained that it has become normalized in society. As a student, Uchikoshi’s classmates weren’t concerned that there were so few women, mostly thinking that women weren’t interested or just weren’t as good at studying as men. Nationally, critics claim that it’s just women’s choice not to apply and therefore not a problem. Uchikoshi counters that “the system is not fair if a sizable number of students who want to apply for—or who want to go to—a specific university don't have the chance because of some structural reasons.” (In 2010, Todai declared that they would bring the percentage of women up to 30 percent, but it has remained flat without big changes to those structural reasons.)

To understand why so few women retake the university entrance exam and lower their chance of a top university admission, it’s important to understand the basics of the Japanese educational system. While Uchikoshi’s story as an exceptionally intelligent child from a modest background is not necessarily typical, we can follow his journey to see the system at work. After junior high, all students take an exam to place them in high school. Uchikoshi was tracked into his town’s top high school where there was an even split between boys and girls. Encouraged by his teachers, he applied to his top-choice college, the University of Tokyo. He was excited by the idea of moving from his conservative town to the big city a few hours away. In Japan, most elite national universities admit a majority of students through a one-shot exam which happens on the same day, so picking a very competitive school is a high risk. Like so many students, Uchikoshi wasn’t accepted to his top-choice school on his first try. Not wanting to give up his dream of Todai, he spent a year as a ronin, the term for a samurai without a master, applied to young people without a university affiliation. He attended a cram school—a specialized school that trains its students to achieve particular goals—twelve hours a day, devoting his year to studying. The tuition would have been a struggle for his family, but the cram school felt he was a good prospect for passing and let him attend free of charge in the hopes they could use him as a success story in the future. He was accepted at Todai a year later on the second try.

Uchikoshi’s story highlights the moment when men’s and women’s educational paths measurably diverge. Official data is difficult to find—the universities provide the number of applicants and the total acceptance rate, but not broken down by gender. The Ministry of Education collects information about admission and enrollment but stopped providing information by gender and retaking status in 2016. Luckily, Uchikoshi had access to the Japanese Life-course Panel Survey of Junior High School Students and Mothers (JLPS-J), a longitudinal study following high school students into their university selection. From this pool, he could trace boys’ and girls’ educational goals, and if they were realized. He also personally interviewed over 180 high school students, parents, and teachers, and through these conversations found common threads in their experiences. 

So why did female students rarely choose to reapply to an elite school after being rejected? “I’ve been wondering for many, many years,” says Uchikoshi. Based on his interviews, the young women were more practical and focused on the future than the young men. Japanese university students generally declare a major upon enrolling, and young women are more likely to have a future occupation in mind, specifically a licensed occupation like lawyer, pharmacist, social worker, or nurse. This kind of vocational training is more readily available at less competitive universities, while elite schools are considered feeders for government and business careers. Male high school seniors are less concrete, saying things like “Oh, I want to be a diplomat. I want to be a politician. I want to be a researcher, but I haven’t decided yet.” There are clear gender differences in what Uchikoshi calls their “imagined futures.” One thought is that for young men it makes sense to aim for the most selective university and take advantage of the social networks and connections to job recruiters since this allows them to maintain maximum future opportunities. 

Of course, parents play an important role in their children’s education. The JLPS-J shows that mothers have higher educational expectations of their sons than their daughters. They are likely to expect their sons to attend a selective national university and for their daughters to attend a non-BA or vocational school. From this, it’s possible to conclude that parents would be less supportive of their daughters spending an intensive, expensive year at a cram school to retake the national exam.

The students absorb these lessons from their families, with their own imagined futures dividing over future visions of family life. The young women Uchikoshi interviewed mostly had considered the possibility of having children. The young men, though, hadn’t really considered wanting children and saw it as a far-off thing that they didn’t need to be concerned about. As Uchikoshi says, “Indeed, they don’t have to think about that because, regardless of whether you have children or not, their career is not affected, whereas for women, having children really matters for your career.” 

Young women have seen the pictures of government cabinets with thirty men and one woman and are aware of what they will face in the future. If they have children, they are expected to leave the workforce for several years. With a licensed occupation like a social worker or pharmacist, women have documentation of their skills and training and can re-enter the workforce more easily. For them, a school offering vocational training is more important than the clout of a national university. If they fail the university exam, they will pick their second-choice university, which tends to be a private university, instead of devoting the next year to cramming for the retake. For these young women, university is a means to an end. The young men, on the other hand, see a top university as the final goal, since it’s a “big marker of success in their life,” as Uchikoshi puts it. They don’t want to have regrets, and they have the freedom to think expansively about their futures. 

Japan has had huge growth of private universities in the last twenty-five years. With this growth of available spots combined with a declining birth rate, more Japanese students than ever have the opportunity to attend college. While private universities are more expensive than government-sponsored national ones, they are still within reach for many people and don’t require large student loans like in the United States. The statistics that more young people than ever attend university can give a misleading picture of a system divided by gender.  

Women’s choice to attend elite universities is also influenced by social class and by the rural/urban divide. Universities don’t have the dormitories we see at American universities, and the University of Tokyo’s housing is especially poor quality. Students already in the city continue to live at home, and those that can afford it opt for private housing. Parents tend to be more concerned about their daughters’ safety than their sons and are less likely to allow them to attend a far-off university on their own, especially one without a safe place to live. Rural parents have more influence on their daughters’ lives and are more likely to say, as Uchikoshi paraphrases, “‘Well, there is a university you can attend from our house. Then why attend university in Tokyo? You don’t want to do that.’ They don’t say that to their male children.”

The University of Tokyo is aware of the housing situation preventing more women from attending. About ten years ago, they began offering a housing stipend to female students living more than ninety minutes from campus. Many people felt the policy was discriminatory toward men, and Uchikoshi recalls strong opposition. “We really like equal treatment,” says Uchikoshi. “We are so used to transparent admissions, which don’t treat people differently.”

The backlash against aid exclusively for women shows the difficulty in changing the system to be more equitable. As was previously mentioned, South Korea seems to have solved their gender disparity. Their elite universities now rely on a holistic admissions process instead of a single exam. Like colleges in the United States, they look at grades, extracurricular activities, essays, and other criteria. This process leads to a fairly equal acceptance rate among men and women. 

Uchikoshi doesn’t think this is the answer for Japan, however. Holistic admissions are a “black box” without clear reasons for acceptance and rejection. He’s suspicious that children of the elite are given favoritism and admitted to top schools like Seoul National and Yonsei. In the United States, most people assume that children of the rich and powerful get special treatment by admissions boards (the recent scandal of celebrities paying for college acceptances for their children was met with more gleeful gossip than shock), but Uchikoshi doesn’t see the Japanese people accepting this system. Even if it leads to more fair admissions, he says, “The idea of fairness is very different. In Japan, fairness means transparency whereas in America, fairness is more geared toward equity, equalizing, and accepting students from underrepresented backgrounds.”

Uchikoshi’s idea to improve gender equality is to keep the “transparent, one-time exam,” but simply allow students to apply for multiple national universities instead of just one at a time, a system that “basically reduces potential mismatch between students’ academic qualifications and the scores’ cutoff line.” Risk-averse young women will have a higher chance of acceptance and will be less likely to face the conundrum of retaking the exam a year later. This sounds like a simple solution, and Uchikoshi isn’t entirely sure why the government and the universities would oppose it. In his understanding, the universities can hold the exam any time in a set window between January and March. Uchikoshi posits this is just due to long-standing custom: “I am assuming this is because the one short, same-day exam has been so traditional that all institutions still think it is just natural to have the exam on the same day.” This also creates less work for the elite universities, who don’t have to worry that top applicants are getting multiple offers, or that they will be penalized for the government by under- or over-enrolling the incoming class. 

Uchikoshi also admits there may be a place for holistic admissions, at least in private universities. While he doesn’t think Japanese people are comfortable with the lack  of transparency in the holistic approach, precedent shows that even supposedly quantitative  exam scores can be altered to favor men under the current system. In 2018, Tokyo Medical University was found to be lowering women’s scores on the entrance exam to cap them at 30 percent of the student body because of the likelihood they would take time off to have children in the future. In fact, they’d been doing this for at least twelve years before they were discovered, and nine other medical schools were also found to have similarly tampered with exam scores.

While the United States doesn’t have the same gender disparity in universities, Uchikoshi is thinking about other interesting parallels. In a conversation with Weatherhead Faculty Associate Sarah Dryden-Peterson, he discussed how visions of the future may differ by class or migration status. In Dryden-Peterson’s work on refugee education, she finds that refugee students are often planning for multiple possible futures, including returns to their home countries, ongoing lives in countries of exile, or futures that may be more transnational, all of which are filled with uncertainties related to conflicts over which they have little control. In Uchikoshi’s observation, affluent American students don’t have a clear vision of their future and attend liberal arts colleges open to possibilities and new experiences. In Japan, this divide in imagined futures leads to men who feel free to wait another year to retake their exams in hopes of getting their top school and women who prioritize a practical career in case they want to start a family. In this intersection of class and gender, we see the common parallel of a privileged group with the freedom of possibilities, and a less privileged group who accepts limited choices to participate in the labor market.

Uchikoshi has a fifteen-year-old brother who recently took his high school entrance exam. For his brother’s entire lifetime, the University of Tokyo has been attempting to raise the percentage of enrolled women from twenty to thirty percent, and yet very little has changed. With the endless cycle of underrepresentation of women in elite universities leading to underrepresentation in government and other influencing careers, combined with a traditional society, this problem is unlikely to be solved soon. Uchikoshi believes that the universe of “imagined futures” should be available equally for everyone, but the universe is shaped differently by gender or social class. “If there is anything we can change to reduce constraints, perhaps we should consider the possibility seriously,” Uchikoshi says. “Do we see a society that overly emphasizes the name of the college as better than alternatives? Should we provide more opportunities for college admissions to level the field? These are all possible ‘imagined futures’ we can envision.”  

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* Figure showing percentage of female students attending different categories of universities in Japan. In order of prestige and selectivity: University of Tokyo; the former imperial universities (Kyoto, Tohoku, Hokkaido, Osaka, Kyushu, and Nagoya); national, private. Source: School Basic Survey, NIAD-QE, and Fumiya Uchikoshi’s calculation based on demographic information provided by each university. Credit: Kristin Caulfield on Canva

Contributor Bios

Fumiya Uchikoshi is an Academy Scholar at The Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies. He received his PhD from the Department of Sociology at Princeton University. His research interests include social stratification; family demography; gender; higher education; and contemporary Japan and East Asia.

Jessica Barnard is an administrator with the Weatherhead Research Clusters on Global History and on Migration. She also is the host of the Epicenter podcast at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs.