Japan’s recent political milestone—the election and re-election of Takaichi Sanae as Prime Minister—has drawn fresh attention to gender inequality in Japanese society. Yet one dimension of this inequality has received little scrutiny: the structural gap between women’s rising educational attainment and their persistent absence from positions of power. Understanding this gap requires a close look at an institution that shaped generations of educated Japanese women and is now quietly disappearing: the women’s university.
The data present a story of progress. In 1985, only 13 percent of women entered four-year universities, compared with 35 percent of men. By 2024, women’s enrollment had reached 56.2 percent, not far off the male rate of 61.9 percent. Yet these aggregate figures conceal persistent inequalities. Women account for just 27.9 percent of STEM undergraduates, 23.4 percent of master’s students, and 20.9 percent of doctoral candidates. The University of Tokyo—Japan’s most prestigious university—remains roughly 80 percent male. Women made up just 28.2 percent of university faculty in 2025 and 14.3 percent of university presidents in 2024. In the labor market, only 8.4 percent of Japanese companies are headed by women. In politics, women hold just 14.6 percent of seats in the lower house, and Japan ranks 118th out of 148 regions on the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Index—last among G7 nations. High enrollment has not translated into leadership.
Part of the explanation lies in structural frictions that persist beyond the university gates: field-of-study segregation channels women away from high-return STEM sectors; societal gendered expectations around career continuity and work-life balance interact with firm-level practices—such as long working hours, seniority-based promotion systems, and implicit biases in evaluation—to produce a “leaky pipeline” in which women exit or stall before reaching leadership tracks; and limited access to mentorship and professional networks depresses promotion probabilities even among equally qualified candidates. Educational attainment, in other words, is necessary but not sufficient.
Against this backdrop, women’s universities are declining. After peaking at 98 institutions in 1998, the number of four-year women’s universities has fallen by more than 30 percent; only 66 remained by 2025, and roughly 70 percent were struggling to fill their quotas. The decline reflects genuine shifts in demand. After Japan’s Equal Employment Opportunity Law came into force in 1986, and as career-track (sōgōshoku) opportunities expanded for women beyond clerical-track (ippanshoku) positions, institutions concentrated in home economics, and literature lost applicants to universities offering economics, business, and engineering.
Some institutions have responded. Nara Women’s University launched an engineering faculty in 2022; Ochanomizu followed with a transdisciplinary engineering school in 2024; Japan Women’s University established a faculty of architecture and design the same year. Kyoto Women’s University opened Japan’s first data science faculty at a women’s university in 2023. These moves are significant, but curriculum change alone is not sufficient. What makes them matter is the environment in which they take place: engineering and data science are taught in institutions where women are the default majority and female leadership is the norm.
Whether the government can actively support that environment, however, is a separate question. Japan’s two national women’s universities—Ochanomizu and Nara—are publicly funded institutions that formally exclude male applicants, a policy that sits in tension with Article 14 of the Constitution, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex. No court has tested this tension, but it creates a theoretical constraint on how far the government can go in actively directing resources toward women’s universities as explicit policy instruments. Private women’s universities are less directly exposed, though they too receive public subsidies.
International comparisons offer instructive lessons. South Korea, once home to 26 women’s universities, now has just seven—a sharper contraction than Japan has yet experienced. When Dongduk Women’s University floated a transition to coeducation in late 2024, students erupted in protest, exposing a live debate: critics argue that women’s universities constitute reverse discrimination in an era of formal equality, while defenders counter that formal and substantive equality are not the same thing. Japan may soon face the same argument.
China offers yet another contrast: after 1949, the Communist Party mandated coeducation across virtually all institutions as a matter of socialist policy, and the handful of women’s universities that exist today, including China Women’s University in Beijing, are in practice coeducational. Taiwan took a different path, not through mandate, but through the steady expansion of a coeducational system underpinned by gender-equity legislation. Female university students outnumbered male students for the first time in 2014, and by 2018, women accounted for more than half of all college graduates—outcomes reflected in Taiwan’s ranking first in Asia on the OECD’s Social Institutions and Gender Index in 2023.
Britain’s experience—Oxford fully coeducational by 2008, Cambridge retaining two women’s colleges under recurring pressure—shows what absorption looks like: gender parity in enrollment broadly achieved, but no institutional model left for cultivating women’s leadership. Canada and Australia followed a similar trajectory from the 1970s onward.
The United States offers a more useful precedent. Women’s colleges declined from more than 200 in 1960 to fewer than 40 today, but the survivors did so by articulating a mission around cultivating female leadership rather than simply defending their existence. Smith College became the first to offer an accredited engineering program in 1999—two decades before Japan’s institutions began doing the same. The broader argument was reflected in the idea of the “Wellesley Effect“: that graduates of women’s colleges reach leadership positions at higher rates than women from comparable institutions. These are environments where women occupy most leadership roles, set the terms of discussion, and develop the confidence to do the same in the wider world.
What the American precedent suggests is less about the formal mission of women’s universities and more about whether the surrounding conditions allow that mission to be realized. American women’s colleges succeeded in part because their graduates entered a labor market that, however imperfectly, was expanding opportunities for women in professional and leadership roles. In Japan, the persistent structural frictions described above mean that even well-prepared graduates encounter barriers that individual institutions cannot remove. This is not a case against women’s universities; it is an argument for treating them as one component of a broader strategy rather than a standalone solution.
What [Japan] lacks is a set of institutions and labor market conditions that translate women’s educational investments into leadership outcomes.
That broader strategy would have two tracks. The first concerns women’s universities directly. Private institutions face fewer constitutional obstacles than the two national universities, and are already moving into STEM on their own initiative; what they still lack is the funding and industry partnerships needed to make those programs competitive. Supporting that expansion—through targeted grants, research partnerships, and connections to employers—is something the government can do without running into the Article 14 complications that would arise from more direct intervention in admissions. The second track addresses those structural barriers directly: stronger pathways from undergraduate to graduate education, systematic leadership development embedded in university programs at both women’s and coeducational institutions, and reforms to promotion and evaluation systems that currently disadvantage women in the workplace.
Japan does not lack educated women. What it lacks is a set of institutions and labor market conditions that translate women’s educational investments into leadership outcomes. Women’s universities, at their best, can help close that gap precisely because they offer environments where women are the default majority and female leadership is the norm, particularly now that their engineering and data science programs extend that environment into fields where women remain most underrepresented. Whether that contribution justifies their survival, and in what form, is a question Japan’s policymakers have yet to answer. The cost of continued inaction is a default outcome: institutions closing one by one, with no careful consideration of what is lost.
(The author would like to thank Kiho Muroga, Associate Professor at Kyushu University, and Charles Crabtree, Senior Lecturer at Monash University, for their valuable suggestions and helpful comments.)
Peter Chai is a Research Associate in the Faculty of Political Science and Economics at Waseda University. His research areas are political sociology, comparative politics, and public opinion. His research method is survey analysis, and his regional focus is East Asia.
