TBS, a television network, cited an unnamed former university admissions official as saying the practice was commonplace among medical schools and that administrators did not see anything wrong with it.
A university spokesman declined to comment.
The revelations triggered an outpouring of criticism online about gender inequality in Japan.
“Those who decided this system never faced problems of balancing housework and child care with a job,” Keiko Ota, a lawyer, said on Twitter. “You got away without doing all that housework and were able to concentrate on just your job thanks to whom? Can you dare say with whom you left your own children?”
Mizuho Fukushima, a lawmaker with the Social Democrat Party, said the school’s practice was clearly a violation of constitutional protections against discrimination. “This is just unacceptable,” she tweeted. “Work-style reform for doctors and child care support should be carried out.”
The reported discrimination at Tokyo Medical University, a prestigious private school, came to light in an internal investigation following the arrest last month of two university officials. The officials are accused of bribery, alleged to have guaranteed admission to a bureaucrat’s son in exchange for state funding, Kyodo News reported.
The allegation that women’s test scores were manipulated has cast a sharp light on Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s efforts to advance the economic empowerment of women, a policy known as “womenomics.”
Japan has lagged behind other developed nations on female participation in the workplace. This has been blamed, in part, on traditional hiring practices that emphasize lifelong employment with a single company. Japanese companies typically require long hours, which clashes with cultural expectations that women are responsible for the bulk of housekeeping and child-rearing responsibilities.
By one basic measurement, economic prospects for women in Japan have improved in recent years, as the proportion of women working has surpassed that in the United States. But women are poorly represented in high-paying and prestigious jobs in government, management and science and technology. As a result, the pay gap is still stubbornly wide.
Acceptance rates are higher for women than men in most university subjects in Japan, including engineering, agriculture, dentistry, nursing and pharmaceutical studies. But they trail in medicine, according to an analysis of Education Ministry statistics by Kyoko Tanebe of the Japan Joint Association of Medical Professional Women.
“These stats indicate universities control the student ratio,” Ms. Tanebe wrote last year.
Some people in the field said they had long suspected that women were being actively prevented from pursuing careers in medicine.
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