Gender inequality in academic medicine in Japan

Dear Sir

According to the latest Japanese Ministry of Health survey, women comprise 18.9% of all physicians and 35.9% of physicians under 30 years old in Japan. Despite increasing number of women physicians, women in leadership positions remain a rarity in Japanese academic medicine. Some countries systematically gather and publish data on faculty ranks and promotions by gender in academic medicine. However, no comparable data exists in Japan. I reviewed the faculty rosters of all 80 Japanese medical schools and found that women constituted only 2.6% of all full-time professors and only two out of 80 deans (2.5%). Of 103 women full-time professors, 49 (48%) had positions in the departments of basic medical sciences. There were only few women professors in the surgical field (one each in neurosurgery, plastic surgery, breast surgery, otolaryngology and obstetrics and gynecology). For 51 public medical schools and 29 private medical schools, the percentages of women full-time professors were 2.2% and 3.1%, respectively. There were no women in full-time professors in approximately one third of medical schools. The scarcity of women in the leadership positions is also evidenced by another survey evaluating the number of women in Japanese academic societies: women comprised only 6.8% of all councilors of Japanese medical societies; 55 out of 100 societies did not have any women in director position (Tomizawa et al. 2012). In surgical societies, women constituted only 1% of councilors. A common argument to justify the paucity of women in leadership positions is that fewer women have been in the field long enough to have achieved leadership positions (the so-called “pipeline” argument) but the proportion of women in leadership positions is substantially lower than expected from the physician gender ratio in the current leadership generation.

Japan lags behind other countries in gender equality. In a report by World Economy Forum (Hausmann et al. 2012), Japan ranks 101th out of 135 countries in gender equality, mainly due to the underrepresentation of women in economic and political participations. My finding suggests that significant gender inequality is also present in academic medicine. Measures are needed to benchmark the representation of women and to promote gender equality in academic medicine in Japan.