Slow progress for women in university leadership

When Masako Egawa became the University of Tokyo’s first female executive vice-president in 2009, her first step after being appointed was to allocate US$4 million to renovate the ageing toilets for women.

“The sorry condition of the bathrooms for women in the university symbolised Japan’s traditional bias against women. My aim was to improve comfort and security for our female employees despite the fact that they continue to comprise the minority,” she told foreign journalists last month.

Egawa, a former banker, was one of seven executive vice-presidents who act as advisors to the president of the University of Tokyo, Japan’s top higher education institution that has been a bastion of male dominance in its 137-year old history.

One way to boost the numbers of women in high-level positions in universities has been to bring women in from outside academia. “The position was offered to me by the government that is pushing women into higher posts. I was not selected by the university,” she said.

As the first woman to break through the glass ceiling in higher education, it is a lonely path – she is often the only woman present at administrative meetings, she said.

Still, Egawa’s is a remarkable success in Japan.

In June, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe made a national pledge to increase the number of women in leadership positions to 30% by 2020 across the public and private sectors, including in higher education and research.

“We are now implementing policy measures for women as part of the economic growth strategy,” Abe told a House of Representatives budget committee meeting in February. “I'll do my best to make Japan a country where the women are the brightest in the world.”

Abe has also said that Japan’s output could rise by as much as 16% if women are brought into the formal economy at the same rate as men. Abe’s strategy, repeated in a speech during the United Nations summit in New York in September, has been dubbed ‘Womenomics’.

Ambitious

But even with Japan’s pool of well-educated women – they comprise 43% of all university students – it is an ambitious plan with overwhelming odds, especially in higher education.

In 2012, female heads made up a dismal 8.7% of Japan’s 746 universities and were mostly at women’s colleges and vocational schools, according to Ministry of Education figures.

The picture is not much better for researchers, even though the government's Basic Plan for Science and Technology includes the goal of raising the proportion of women among newly hired natural science researchers to 30%.

A 2014 Ministry of Education White Paper on Gender Equality from the prime minister’s cabinet office revealed that Japanese women are just 14.5% of all researchers, behind even 17% for South Korea.

Women researchers are concentrated in universities, while almost two thirds of male researchers are in companies where pay is usually higher. Women researchers are also predominantly in the humanities. In science research they make up just 13.2% and in engineering research 9.7% of the workforce.

With a shrinking population, there is recognition of the need to train women engineers for the future, for Japan to maintain its industrial strength.

Slow to open up

Professor Kayo Inaba was recently appointed vice-president at Kyoto University after heading the university’s first gender equality section established in 2014. The university is finally opening the door slowly to women after years of resistance, she said in an interview.

Kyoto University, Japan’s second most prestigious national university after Tokyo, turns out top graduates who head for influential positions in government and the private sector. It was one of the last universities to apply for government grants to help increase the number of women in top administrative positions by setting up a specific department for that purpose.

Termed the gender promotion project under the ministry’s Basic Plan for Science and Technology, the programme launched in 2006 is defined as a model for women’s advancement in Japanese higher education institutions.

Japanese gender experts also launched the ‘Shinagawa Proposal 2014’ on 2 July in collaboration with the Asia-Pacific Women in Leadership Programme, which includes universities from the region, the United States and Australia.

Named after the area of Tokyo where the meeting was held, the Shinagawa Proposal aims to push universities and government to commit to increasing the proportion of women in faculty research and executive positions through recruitment, retention and promotion.

The declaration issued called on Japanese universities to set their own goals and annual performance indicators for the improvement in the status of women in universities.

Support

Inaba says a core mission for gender equality is to support women who plan to continue working after having children.

“When women take maternity leave, they are transferred to other sections (of the university) that have less responsibility. As a result they lose their ambition and do not want to compete for the bigger jobs in the university,” Inaba told University World News.

Several steps taken to challenge male dominance include offering management training for women and providing role models.

Kyoto University has now appointed counsellors and offers childcare when children of female professors fall sick, so that they are able to continue teaching.

From this month Inaba takes on the status of vice-president and has invited women professors into management positions. But she says she has already run into problems.

“In September I was told by a veteran male member that the female professor selected simply did not have the necessary knowledge. There is resistance to change,” she pointed out.

Other challenges include a preference among academia, especially females, to concentrate on personal research rather than be involved in management.

And statistics in Japan show the uphill battle to gender empowerment is not restricted to university careers but is also rooted at the student level – while females represent almost half the graduates at four-year universities, when it comes to postgraduate or PhD students, the numbers drop drastically.

According to Ministry of Education figures, enrolment at graduate level was 51,558 for men but just 21,000 for women. For PhDs it is 10,608 for men and 4,800 for women.

A key reason for this situation, according to Tokyo University’s Masako Egawa, is that parents have long told their daughters that graduating from the University of Tokyo reduces their opportunities to find themselves a husband.

“There is enormous social pressure on women to play the role of second fiddle to men in Japan,” she stressed.