Of course women outperformed men when a medical school stopped rigging exams – discrimination is designed to hold us back

When news broke last year that some medical schools in Japan had knowingly rigged exams in order to reduce the number of women working in medicine, I was shocked. Initially.

For a moment, before I cast my mind back to my own experiences and tonnes of research proving the prevalence of systematic gender discrimination globally, it seemed almost far-fetched that an institution would not only deliberately take steps to hold women back, but go so far as defending that position. Almost.

“Many female students who graduate end up leaving the medical practice to give birth and raise children,” said an unnamed source in an attempt to explain the practice at Tokyo Medical University at the time, furthering the assumption that women who can and wish to give birth should automatically have their prospects curtailed without their permission.

But a year later, it has emerged that after another medical school in Japan, Juntendo University, scrapped similarly discriminatory exam practices, women outperformed men enitrely.

In a statement, the university said: “This is a result of abolishing the unfair treatment of female applicants and repeat applicants,” which was a complete U-turn from the dean’s earlier assertion that “In some ways” the measure was positive, because it would “help male applicants” who had fallen behind.

Of course, this is an issue that spans nations. Just yesterday in the UK, Stella Creasy, Labour MP, lamented feeling like she had to choose between “being an MP and being a mum”, after the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority denied her request for paid cover for her casework so she could take maternity leave.

And last week, Swiss women went on strike in protest of gender discrimination in the country at large. To varying degrees and for a number of reasons, gender discrimination at work persists – everywhere. So much so, that attempts to redress the imbalance often fall short, or at the very least, fail to point to the severity of the ways in which existing structures hold us back, sometimes against our knowledge.

Earlier this year, for example, after it was revealed that some companies had sidestepped mandatory gender pay gap reporting rules by submitting inaccurate data, the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) came under fire for its failure to identify as well as sanction companies that had failed to comply with mandatory pay gap reporting rules.

And anecdotally, if it hasn’t already happened to us in the past, most of us know someone whose workplace, place of study or even social group, position themselves as being staunchly against sexism as a matter of principle, while still, say, casually dishing out micro-aggressions about women on a daily basis or overlooking them for opportunities.

So when the rare occurrence of attempts to redress the imbalance actually pay off, as seems to have occurred at Juntendo University, it was somewhat comforting. Because it serves as a reminder of the fact that this is exactly how discrimination is supposed to work.

Marginalised groups are categorised as lesser than whatever established norm in society; policy is designed directly to hold them back; people, including those targeted by unfair treatment, start to believe that their identity, not their individual capabilities, directly inform what they can and can’t achieve.

While overt rigging may not be rife in other places to the same degree that it seems to have been in Japan, I wonder how many other examples of discrimination would confirm, to those who aren’t already sold, that it’s usually the system – not the gender, race, ability, class or sexuality of a person – that often determines how successful they’re likely to be.