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The Vietnam National University – Hanoi will enforce a regulation that gives priority to female applicants over their male counterparts in their recruitment for master programs from 2015 onward, in an attempt to help more women earn academic degrees.

According to the master training regulation the school has just issued, female candidates will receive priority in admissions when they score the same as male applicants on the entrance exam. 

On Saturday, Professor Nguyen Dinh Duc, head of the training board of the university, confirmed the school’s policy, saying it follows the regulation on master programs promulgated this year by the Ministry of Education and Training.

Meanwhile, Nguyen Thi Kim Phung, deputy head of the Department of Higher Education and Training under the ministry, also vouched for the priority when talking to Tuoi Tre (Youth) newspaper, adding the ministry’s regulation is in line with the government’s decree on gender equality.

Accordingly, the ministry’s rule on master training regulates that if there are contestants with the same scores, universities will choose students in order of priority for females first, then people earning high scores in subjects related to their major, and lastly those with high scores on tests in foreign languages.

However, Phung said when the ministry sourced feedback on the regulation, a number of universities said there should be no priority given to female candidates because women are talented and the move may, in some cases, offend them.

“They said that women do not need the priority, but didn’t say that the regulation is unreasonable,” Phung noted.

She added that protesting the move is justified from universities’ points of view, but statistics show that the number of female masters and doctors is still lower than male scholars, whereas women occupy a larger share of the population than men do.

According to Phung, such priority will not have much effect on admission quality.

She revealed that the Ministry of Education and Training is planning a new regulation on doctorate training and expects to add similar priority for females to it in the near future.