Ueno at Todai 2019: Meritocracy Masks Sex Discrimination

On 12 April 2019, Chizuko Ueno, then board chair of the certified NPO Women’s Action Network (WAN), gave the guest congratulatory address at the undergraduate matriculation ceremony of the University of Tokyo (Todai), Heisei 31-nendo Tōkyō Daigaku gakubu nyūgakushiki shukuji. Her audience had just survived a fierce entrance contest, and her opening tested the premise they were least likely to doubt: that the selection had been fair. In some 4,400 Japanese characters the speech puts entrance exams, campus social life and the faculty hierarchy under one question—how an institution that proves its fairness through scores distributes opportunity outside them.

How statistics put the “fair exam” on trial

The starting point is the previous year’s Tokyo Medical University scandal, in which the school was found to have discriminated against women and rōnin (repeat) applicants. A follow-up survey of all 81 medical universities and faculties by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) found that men’s acceptance rates averaged about 1.2 times women’s. Tokyo Medical University stood at 1.29 and Juntendo topped the list at 1.67, with other private schools—Showa, Nihon, Keio—near the top; ratios below 1.0, where women got in more easily, clustered at regional national universities such as Tottori, Shimane, Tokushima and Hirosaki. A MEXT official commented that “no other faculty or department favors men; in both science and the humanities women are often ahead.” Ueno draws the inference that a medical-school ratio above 1 requires some explanation and cannot be brushed off with “the men simply scored higher.”

Statistics matter, Ueno stresses, because reasoning has to start from them. The figures are most telling in their distribution, not their average. The speech names only Tokyo Medical University; the 1.2 gap across medical schools is, for Ueno, a statistical signal that needs explaining—she does not claim every school rigged its scores. In fact, MEXT’s December 2018 final report found entrance procedures at nine other universities “inappropriate,” including Juntendo, which had the highest ratio. The concentration of high ratios at private schools and low ones at regional national schools at least suggests that the gap tracks admissions discretion and institutional preference, and that exposed fraud is only the part that has come to light. Ueno leaves Todai’s own Science III figure, 1.03—below average, still above parity—to her listeners: how should this number be read? Its weight lies in being unremarkable. A university confident that it beats the average is often the one most inclined to wave through a small, steady skew.

She then counts the sorting that happens before the exam. Various data, she says, show that women applicants have higher standardized scores (hensachi) than men. Women tend to leave themselves a safety margin and choose safer targets to avoid a rōnin year; Todai’s share of women entrants has long failed to break a “20% wall,” falling to 18.1% that year; and since score distributions show no sex difference, it follows that the women who apply to Todai are stronger than the men. A gap in four-year university enrollment rates (2016 School Basic Survey: 55.6% of men, 48.2% of women) is, she says, not a gap in grades but the result of parents’ sex discrimination—parents who think “university for sons, junior college for daughters” is enough. Taking Malala Yousafzai’s visit to Japan as her cue, she borrows the sociological term “cooling out” of aspiration for dampening girls with “you’re only a girl anyway,” and uses Malala’s father’s remark about not clipping his daughter’s wings to say that many daughters have had theirs broken.

Kawaii and the high-achieving woman

A second anchor lies in everyday campus life. At mixers (gōkon) with other universities, Todai men are popular; women students at Todai told Ueno that when asked where they study, they answer “a university… in Tokyo…,” because saying “Todai” puts people off. Ueno’s explanation is a twist (nejire): a man’s social worth aligns with good grades, while a woman’s is at odds with them. Girls are expected from childhood to be kawaii, and the value of being loved, chosen and protected carries a guarantee that one will never threaten the other person—so high grades and a Todai affiliation become things to hide. The point of the passage is that discrimination moves out of admissions and into intimacy and self-presentation: no rule tells women to downplay themselves; they enforce the discipline on their own.

Life after enrollment is part of the evidence too. Five male students from Todai’s Faculty of Engineering and graduate school sexually assaulted a female student from a private university; three were expelled and two suspended. Novelist Kaoruko Himeno based her novel Kanojo wa atama ga warui kara (“Because she’s not smart”) on the case; its title reportedly comes from a remark one perpetrator made under police questioning, and a symposium on the book was held on campus. Reading it, Ueno says, shows how society sees Todai men. She adds that men’s clubs which effectively bar Todai women while admitting women from other universities still exist, as they did when she was a student half a century earlier; in March 2019 Todai’s executive vice president for gender equality warned that such exclusion violates the equality principle of the University of Tokyo Charter. Her conclusion: the schools students came from were societies of nominal equality, hidden discrimination already begins at university entry, it grows blunter in working life, and Todai is one example.

The numbers give that verdict a shape. Women are about 20% of undergraduates, rising to about 25% of master’s students and 30.7% of doctoral students—and then the curve collapses: 18.2% among assistant professors, 11.6% among associate professors and just 7.8% among full professors, which Ueno notes is below the share of women in the Diet. One of fifteen deans was a woman; no woman had ever been president. The line does not shrink step by step; it breaks at the hiring point between the doctorate and a faculty post. Ueno does not spell this out, but the numbers point to it: the problem is not that women “can’t keep up” with their studies but whom academic hiring allows to stay.

Put together, the mechanism comes into focus. When “exam fairness” is the language that legitimizes an elite, Tokyo Medical University’s score manipulation and the ratio gap across medical schools, the cooling out of girls’ aspirations before the test, and campus hostility toward “threatening” clever women can each be filed away as an isolated scandal, a family choice or a matter of taste rather than read as one gender order. School-level score competition genuinely does not divide by sex, and that very appearance of neutrality gives cover to hidden discrimination at the university threshold and beyond it: everyone talks in points, while application strategy, family investment and kawaii norms have already sorted the field.

The tension: proving discrimination through merit

The second half of the address turns to knowledge and ethics. Women’s studies, later called gender studies, was born outside the university and later broke into it; when Ueno arrived a quarter century earlier she was the third woman on the Faculty of Letters, driven by “insatiable curiosity and anger at social injustice.” She calls women’s studies an academic “venture,” one of several new fields—environmental studies, informatics, disability studies—that arose because the times demanded them. She then states plainly that Todai is open to change and diversity, offering as proof that it hired her and put her on this stage, and naming Zainichi Korean professor Kang Sang-jung; Tadao Ando, a professor with only a high-school diploma; and deafblind professor Satoshi Fukushima. She reminds the new students that they were selected and that the state reportedly spends about five million yen a year on each Todai student; then she dismantles the belief that effort is rewarded: being able to believe it is the gift of an environment that encouraged, lifted and praised them, not of effort itself. She asks them to use their advantages to help, not demean, the less fortunate, and defines feminism with care: it is not a wish of women to act like men, or of the weak to become strong, but a demand that the weak be respected as the weak. Finally, she places the value of university study in acquiring knowledge that produces knowledge—meta-knowledge—and argues that diversity matters because new value arises where cultures meet and create friction.

The chain’s force is that it puts the admissions fraud and the medical-school ratio gap, kawaii discipline and the faculty break under one question: the more elite meritocracy insists that exams are neutral, the easier it becomes to retell structural exclusion as a difference in individual effort. Ueno has already disarmed the paradox of being invited to criticize her host: she presents the fact that Todai hired “someone like me” and put her on this stage as proof of openness and says outright that Todai, too, is an example of discrimination. The unresolved tension lies inside her argument. To show that women face discrimination she relies on a merit inference—women who apply to Todai are more able than the men—assembled from application strategy, the 20% share and an assumption about score distributions, without addressing applicant self-selection. Yet the second half of the speech dismantles “effort is rewarded” and defines feminism as respect for the weak as weak. If the case against discrimination is that women score higher, on what grounds can women who do not score higher, or who never got the chance to strive, claim fairness?

That question also leads to Ueno’s Misogyny, which argues that under patriarchy women’s worth is reduced to being chosen by men and that women’s self-loathing is internalized misogyny. The Todai student who blurs her university’s name is an everyday version of that “value of being chosen,” enacted at Japan’s most prestigious university.