page_title: Women in Japan
section_title: Education
hierarchical_section_title: Women in Japan / Education
caption_attribution_description: 日本語: 市立富山高等女学校弓道場
context_page_description: While women in Japan were recognized as having equal legal rights to men after World War II, economic conditions for women remain unbalanced. Modern policy initiatives to encourage motherhood and workplace participation have had mixed results.
  Women in Japan obtained the right to vote in 1945. While Japanese women's status has improved in the last decades, traditional expectations for married women and mothers are cited as a barrier to full economic equality. The monarchy is strictly males-only and a princess has to give up her royal status when she marries a commoner.
context_section_description: [[File:Summer Evening Beside the Lake by Fujishima Takeji (Geidai Museum).jpg|thumb|left|Teenage girls reading books, Summer Evening Beside the Lake (1897) by Fujishima Takeji ]]
  With the development of society, more and more girls are going to colleges to receive higher education. Today, more than half of Japanese women are college or university graduates. The proportion of female researchers in Japan is 14.6%.
  Modern education of women began in earnest during the Meiji era's modernization campaign. The first schools for women began during this time, though education topics were highly gendered, with women learning arts of the samurai class, such as tea ceremonies and flower arrangement. The 1871 education code established that students should be educated "without any distinction of class or sex". Nonetheless, after 1891 students were typically segregated after third grade, and many girls did not extend their educations past middle school.
  By the end of the Meiji period, there was a women's school in every prefecture in Japan, operated by a mix of government, missionary, and private interests. By 1910, very few universities accepted women. Graduation was not assured, as often women were pulled out of school to marry or to study "practical matters".
  Notably, Tsuruko Haraguchi, the first woman in Japan to earn a PhD, did so in the US, as no Meiji-era institution would allow her to receive her doctorate. She and other women who studied abroad and returned to Japan, such as Yoshioka Yayoi and Tsuda Umeko, were among the first wave of women's educators who lead the way to the incorporation of women in Japanese academia.
  After 1945, the Allied occupation aimed to enforce equal education between sexes; this included a recommendation in 1946 to provide compulsory co-education until the age of 16. By the end of 1947, nearly all middle schools and more than half of high schools were co-educational.
  In 2012, 98.1% of female students and 97.8% of male students were able to reach senior high school. Of those, 55.6% of men and 45.8% of women continued with undergraduate studies, although 10% of these female graduates attended junior college.
caption: Girls' high school in early period, c. 1939.
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