Morgan State University grad LaShawn Toyoda is a mom, a software engineer, and the creator of Find a Doc. In this workforce letter, with excerpts from a Women of Color magazine Q&A, she shares her experience as a woman of color in Japan and how she came to build an open-source database of clinics offering waiting lists for appointments to get a Covid vaccine in Japan. Her site has since received thousands of visits and helps foreigners in Japan access medical treatment and English-speaking doctors. Read on...
I’m still new to software engineering, but I learned one critical lesson at the beginning of my career. You don’t have to be an amazing coder to make something that could significantly impact society. I was fresh out of boot camp and getting the hang of my first job when I launched Find a Doc.
In the summer of 2021, Japan began rolling out COVID vaccines and used a voucher process to determine who was eligible to receive one. Initially, the most vulnerable people were prioritized to be vaccinated, and there was no official word from the government when anyone under the age of 80 could receive the COVID vaccine.
Japan had a complex system where each city had its vouchers and a timeline for when people could get vaccinated. Only a handful of clinics in each city could even administer the vaccine. In addition, many of these cities and clinics didn’t update their websites with information regularly. Hence, people became anxious and worried about the lack of data from the government and healthcare facilities.
There wasn’t any official documentation or guidelines for how to join these cancellation waiting lists. They were something that individual clinics decided to create, and murmurs of their existence had started spreading on Twitter.
One evening, I created Find a Doc, a database for clinics with cancellation waiting lists that people could sign up for to get the vaccine if someone with a voucher canceled or didn’t attend their appointment. It allowed people to register on call to get to the clinic at a moment’s notice to get vaccinated and prevent it from going to waste.
I created a form that users could fill out with information regarding any cancellation waiting list they found so it could be added to the database for other users to see and sign up for. The project went viral, and less than 24 hours later, the database went down due to the demand exceeding the free quota for the service I had started it with. People began donating their money and time to keep the database active and to improve it.
Find a Doc grew to include information on over 100 clinics that offered cancellation waiting lists in over 21 languages, thanks to the efforts of software engineers and translator volunteers in only a couple of weeks. By the end of summer, the database had successfully helped thousands get vaccinated across Japan.
In terms of coding, what I did wasn’t complicated at all, but the community impact was massive. I hope sharing my story will help other women shed insecurities or misconceptions about software engineering. You don’t have to be the greatest in the field to make something considered a huge societal breakthrough.
Software engineering provides great opportunities and the freedom to work remotely or from home. The hours lost to commuting will always be retained. The salary is better than average in almost any country as there is always a demand for your skills.
I first became interested in computer science when I was in elementary school. In the early 90s, my only computer access was in our library or classroom. I enjoyed playing typing games or just fooling around with a word processor. It wasn’t until I was in middle school that I received my first computer from my stepbrother, a military contractor.
He would occasionally receive old computers that the military base no longer needed and gathered a bunch of parts to put one together for me. I didn’t have access to the internet back then, but I started to play around with Microsoft Basic and eventually taught myself HTML.
My coding journey was an unusual one. I graduated from Morgan State University in 2010 with a degree in political science. The United States was in a recession, and jobs were scarce and hard to find. A friend convinced me to give English teaching abroad a try. I had nothing to lose and knew I wanted to return to Japan one day after studying abroad during my third year of university.
In April 2011, I began teaching English to elementary and junior high school students in the rural countryside of Japan. This was about a year after the Great Tohoku Earthquake that had shocked the nation. Many ex-pats fled to their home countries for safety, so there was a huge shortage of teachers, and I was quickly able to start a position that paid better than what I would’ve been making in the U.S. at the time. In addition, teaching English was nice for a few years because I could meet many people, see new places, and make new friends.
Then, I moved to the city of Yokohama and began teaching students of all ages for a company that offered the highest salary I ever thought I’d be able to make as a foreigner in Japan. My fellow teachers often left after a year or two to return to their home countries because they felt their career options were too limited. For a long time, I accepted English teaching as my fate if I wanted to continue living here for the rest of my life. However, COVID hit, and then everything changed.
I began learning to code during the lockdown in 2020. My last teaching job was as an English teacher for a private university in Tokyo. I had gone on maternity leave, so when my maternity leave was ending, I had to decide between teaching in person or quitting my job. I chose the latter.
After encouragement from a coding boot camp and tech leader in Tokyo, I tried some of the free JavaScript courses offered by Code Academy online to see if programming was something I might be interested in as a career. Like many during that time, I felt much pressure in various aspects of my life and knew I needed to make a career change to help support my family.
So, I began by staying up at night to code while my daughter was sleeping. Then, when it felt safe enough to send her to daycare, I used that free time to enroll in more online coding courses and got accepted into the Immersive Coding Bootcamp at Code Chrysalis. It was one of the hardest things I had done since graduating college, but also one of the most exciting and rewarding. I finished the coding boot camp in January 2021 and accepted my first job as a software engineer two months later.
I was fortunate to attend a historically Black college and university (HBCU). It helped shed my doubts and insecurities about traveling abroad and entering the workforce as a Black woman. In a homogenous country like Japan, where 98% of the population is Japanese, it wasn’t uncommon for me to be the only Black person in the city. However, after nearly 12 years of living here, I can say that I’ve always felt safer living as a Black woman in Japan than I ever felt while in the U.S.
That said, gender bias seems more noticeable in Japan than in the US. Men are more likely to get promoted to better-paying positions with less experience. In 2021, Japan ranked number 116 in the 2022 Global Gender Gap Report out of 146 countries. (source) Just a few years ago, Tokyo Medical University—one of the highest and most respected in the country—was caught rigging the test results for women applicants to prevent more women from entering the university than men. Gender biases are introduced and reinforced early here, and Japan has [relatively] the lowest share of women studying STEM science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) subjects.
Implicit bias exists on every level in Japanese society; I even saw it in my coding boot camp cohort. The Japanese women in my batch struggled to find jobs post-graduation because of societal biases, and some even returned to their previous non-technical careers.
There is an unsaid expectation of women here to 'stay in their place' and you can imagine where that 'place' is. There have been many comments from politicians blaming women for the declining birth rate. Even though this is 2023, Japanese women are expected to drop everything, including their careers, to become breeding machines. Women’s value to Japanese society seems tied to their ability to procreate.
Japan has a reputation for excluding non-Japanese people, so the societal expectation isn't placed on me as a visible foreigner. Not all is well, however. Even among foreigners, there is a clear hierarchy, with white men at the very top as the “desirable” immigrant. And just so we’re clear, black women are not at the bottom; instead, it is often other Asians who are treated the worst. From my experience, I usually have more work opportunities than Japanese women and sometimes command a higher salary.
