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Unequal opportunity
ASEE Prism, Mar 2002 by Craft, Lucille
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WOMEN ENGINEERS AND SCIENTISTS WHO WANT TO PURSUE ACADEMIC CAREERS IN JAPAN FACE ALMOST INSURMOUNTABLE OBSTACLES, BUT INCREASINGLY THEY'RE FIGHTING BACK,
TOKYO-In another country, 59-year-old Nobuko Wakayama night be resting on her laurels. Over a career spanning three decades, the chemist has explored everything from the field of electroluminescence to magnetoaerodynamics, the magnetic control of air flow and combustion-work that has been widely published around the world and earned her official kudos along with many invitations to speak overseas.
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But instead of satisfaction, Wakayama looks back with anger and regret. Her career was all but derailed, she says, by humiliations large and small inflicted by her employer, the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology in Tsukuba, and male colleagues at other universities. She contemplates her mandatory retirement next year with sorrow at opportunities squandered and talent wasted.
While Japanese women have made strides in the workplace since the early 1980s with the passage of a new equal opportunity law, gender discrimination persists in the ivory tower, especially in the male-dominated world of science and engineering. Blatant sexism has faded in the West, allowing female scientists and engineers to concentrate on issues such as childcare and returning to the lab after maternity, but their Japanese counterparts are still struggling merely to be recognized as equals.
From research institutes and college campuses, women are starting to fight back against a peculiar brand of repression known as "akahara,' short for "academic harassment." Akahara typically involves verbal abuse and backstage badmouthing. or other varieties of fraternity-style hazing designed to intimidate a junior researcher or student. Or, since Japanese society still frowns on outright dismissal, akahara also is a time-tested way for a professor to make room on the staff for a new hire by making life so miserable for an existing employee that she leaves on her own.
There are no comprehensive statistics, but the first akahara survey, published two years ago by Hiroshima University, found almost a third of female respondents claiming to have been a target. Interviews with female scholars and a number of books, such as "Stop Akahara" by University of Tokyo sociologist Chizuko Ueno, indicate that the problem is widespread.
TRADITION BOUND
"The gender ideology of the 1960s still rules," noted physicist Motoko Kuwahara, in a monograph published in 2001, "Japanese Women in Science and Technology." That women exist primarily to serve as wives and mothers is widely assumed by many Japanese men and even women to be a strong cultural tradition. But Kuwahara, who teaches contemporary science and technology at Momoyama Gakuin University, points out that a majority of Japanese women worked until just after World War II. It was in the 1960s, when Japan's leaders were piloting the country's rapid reconstruction and industrial growth, that public policy sought to create a loyal workforce of "corporate samurai"-and an equally devoted corps of women who stayed home to support them. If dedicated housewives were essential to the country's economy, welleducated women, to paraphrase one professor, would court national decline. Hence, boys were shepherded into tech courses and girls into home economics; and incentives for working women, such as joint tax returns for married working couples, were scrupulously avoided.
Under pressure from the U.N. Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women, Japan finally ended gender-based curricula in 1989. But the notion that women belong at home, or at least in undemanding jobs that don't get in the way of housekeeping, has proved harder to erase. Wakayama compares female scientists and engineers to "the lowest Indian caste," considered fair game for bullying by their male colleagues. "If a woman is cute, she's OK," says Wakayama. "But if she tries to think for herself, she runs right into a wall."
Wakayama was asked to resign right after her first child was born in 1971. She held her ground, but the heat was turned up in 1996, when Wakayama's male boss took to berating and threatening her: "If you don't do as you're told, something awful will happen to you." True to his word, while Wakayama was in the midst of preparing documents for a government achievement award, her lab equipment and computer were vandalized. Winning the commendation only incited him further: "Your work is worthless," he declared repeatedly, cutting off funds for her research. She eventually got her grant, but only by asking a male colleague at another lab to apply in his own name.
Wakayama's travails multiplied when she dared to question the validity of a paper by a male professor at the prestigious University of Tokyo; he promptly retaliated by making sure her work was rejected for publication. Though Wakayama prevailed, her coworkers were less than supportive, warning in scary terms to "stay away from the edges of train platforms" and "avoid walking alone at night."
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