Japan adopts quota for women in engineering courses – 03/08/2023 – Education

More and more Japanese universities are instituting special quotas for women in undergraduate engineering courses, in an effort to achieve a better gender balance in a traditionally male-dominated field.

Tokyo Institute of Technology, where women make up just 13% of undergraduate students, will launch its quota program in 2024. Dean Kazuya Masu believes that greater gender parity will benefit everyone. “Flexibility and creativity are rare in groups formed by the same type of people”, he explains.

The university has made previous efforts to attract more female students, but the number of women studying engineering has not increased. The institution hopes that this problem will be solved with the creation of the female quota. The quota for 2024 foresees 58 female students and the one for 2025, 143. The forecast is that with this the rate of women enrolled in the engineering course will rise to more than 20% of the total.

A survey by the Ministry of Education in 2021 revealed that there are 60,000 women enrolled in university departments linked to engineering – less than 16% of the 380,000 students in the area across the country. It is the lowest female participation in any university area.

Japan loses to other developed countries in this regard. According to the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development), only 7% of Japanese university students chose to major in science and engineering in 2019, against an average of 15% across all OECD member countries.

The industry is the driving force behind this campaign for greater gender parity; today many companies believe that diversity fosters greater innovation. In 2016, Development Bank of Japan Inc. released a study showing that the economic value of patents developed by teams that included women was 1.4 times greater than that of patents developed exclusively by men.

Engineering departments reacted accordingly. The website of the University of Nagoya, for example, states that “diverse human resources are needed to bring flexible ideas and new points of view” and that “disruptive innovation is necessary”. For 2023, the university now has a quota of nine female students in its engineering program.

“There is great demand from companies that want to hire female engineering graduates because they consider a woman’s point of view important,” said Seiichi Miyazaki, director of the engineering department. “The employment placement rate for these students has been almost 100%, but their number is low.”

Miyazaki explains that the department’s quota was integrated into the entrance exam by commendation, which bases its selection on “different criteria in addition to academic competence”.

Shibaura Institute of Technology is introducing similar entrance exams for female engineering students, and Nara Women’s University opened its engineering faculty in 2022 with 45 full-time students. In a poll, many of the new female students said they chose the university because it is for women only and they thought they would feel comfortable.

Another women-only institution, Ochanomizu University, will open an engineering department in 2024. Describing the reality for female engineering students, a university representative commented: “It’s a chicken or egg situation. Women don’t come because there are so many men. So we need to create eggs first to make the cycle change”.

Translated by Clara Allain.

This story is being published as part of the “Towards Equality” project, an international and collaborative initiative that includes 14 media outlets to present the challenges and solutions to achieving gender equality.

Hajime Ueno, Chika Yamamoto and Fumio Masutani