A Japanese First at Hosei University

Miki Tanikawa of NYTimes profiles Prof. Yoko Tanaka, the first woman to lead a "major Japanese University":

The traditional, mild-mannered appearance of Yuko Tanaka, clad in a kimono and geta sandals, belies the unbending determination of the woman who has become the first female president of one of Japan’s oldest and largest universities.

With the curious mixture of quiet Japanese elegance and the gravitas that comes with holding the top seat at Hosei University, a 130-year-old institution with about 30,000 students and 1,500 faculty and staff, Professor Tanaka, 62, makes regular appearances on a Sunday morning talk show aired on the Tokyo Broadcasting System, where she is known for her tirades against the right-leaning government of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.

The appointment a year ago of Professor Tanaka, the first woman to be named president of a major Japanese university, could not have come at a more relevant or ripe moment. A long, sleepy era for Japanese universities ended in the 1990s when a demographic shift occurred: A sharp decline in the number of young people put academic institutions in the position of having to compete for new students. [Bold emphasis added]

Women in Science in Japan

NYTimes ran a story on the massive underrepresentation of women in the sciences -- Japan's "Science Women" Seek an Identity by Miki Tanikawa. The story covers this phenomenon from many different angles, but this one stood out for me: the fate of a proposal to guarantee at least 5 seats (out of 54) for women in the Math department at Kyushu University:

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.