The long-running American TV series "Grey's Anatomy" is popular because of the way it mixes standard medical drama with mushy romantic intrigue, but another part of its appeal is the makeup of its characters. The drama takes place in the surgical department of a Seattle hospital, and half the doctors are women. About half are also African-Americans, with other minorities thrown in, as well as some LGBT characters.

As with the romantic elements' relation to real life, the cast is not representative of the American medical world as a whole. Only 19 percent of practicing U.S. surgeons are female. As a field, surgery has always been something of a boys club.

In Japan, the ratio of surgeons who are female is even smaller — 5.2 percent — and one of the excuses given by people who defend Tokyo Medical University's habit of reducing entrance test scores for female applicants is that the school doesn't want to go to the trouble and expense of training surgeons who will quit after they have children. In a recent series, the weekly magazine Gendai quoted one doctor as saying "surgery requires physical power" that women don't possess. This is, of course, nonsense. "Grey's Anatomy" is fluff and not above assigning characters traditional gender roles, but the female surgeons are just as physically resilient as the male surgeons. It's never an issue on the show, and common sense says it isn't one in real life.