In Japan, according to the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, women accounted for 14 percent of science and engineering students at universities. In the humanities, they make up 66 percent. The low ratio of female students in science and engineering is related to the widely shared perception that studying sciences could be the kiss of death for young Japanese woman's romantic life: the men think that the women in science, disheveled and who does not care about beauty, are not cute.

“With the population shrinking, we need to tap into women in order to generate capable engineers in the future”, said Toshio Maruyama, executive vice president for education and international affairs at the Tokyo Institute of Technology (Titech), one of the leading science schools in Japan.The Japanese government is especially concerned by the fact that only 13 percent of Japanese scholars and researchers are women, which is a lower proportion than Europe, the United States and South Korea.

For some years now, TiTech and other Japanese universities are trying to change the trend by attracting high school girls and their parents with science-themed fairs, workshop, campus tours and lab visits. Some send young female researchers across the country as ambassadors.The government, in the 2008, began subsidized programs to support scientific research conducted by female scientists and increased funding to help universities employ more of them.Today, the topic of women entering these field has become fashionable: they even have a nickname: “Rikejo”, “science in women”. Publishers print magazines for young women interested in sciences, and there is a novel about a “mathematics girl”.

Naoto Ohtake, engineering professor at TiTech, remembers that when he began to study in the 1982 there were no females, while today about 6 percent of Titech's mechanical engineering students are women.

A.G.