Tokyo's education board decided Monday to scrap its gender quota for all admissions of full-time public high school students taking general courses, starting from the 2024 school year.
The Tokyo Metropolitan Board of Education is the last board in Japan with a quota for ensuring an equal gender ratio. It will start passing individuals based on grades-based ranking only amid criticism that the differing pass mark for men and women is unfair.
The capital's education board decided in 2021 to reconsider the use of gender quotas for full-time schools with general courses, introducing its new non-gender-based system in stages in subsequent years.
Ten percent of the students enrolled in the 2022 school year and 20 percent of those enrolled in the following year were admitted under the grade ranking system. School years in Japan typically start in April.
Except for Tokyo's, all other local school boards had decided by 2021 to no longer require applicants to specify their gender on their admission forms, reflecting a growing awareness of sexual diversity in the country.
Many students who were either transgender or nonbinary cited psychological distress when forced to specify a gender they did not identify with.
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