Meaning of ような when it is not decribing likeness/appearance

Question

Well, my first foray into grown-up news isn't going so well. Back to the sentence from my previous question:

順天堂大学の医学部入試で、女性が不利になるような基準で判定され不合格になったとして、受験した女性13人が大学側に賠償を求めた裁判で、東京地方裁判所は「性別だけで一律に不利益に扱う判定基準は不合理で差別的だ」として、大学側に合わせて800万円余りの支払いを命じる判決を言い渡しました。

In my original attempt, I got stuck at this part 女性が不利になるような基準で and fudged the ような to give "criteria which appear to disadvantage women". This did not escape the eagle eye of aguijonazo.

I'm familiar with two uses of ような/ように:

1. XようなY = Y which is like X
2. The mystery one that goes in things like ようにする which I just accept as set phrases.

This one seems to be different. To quote a comment from aguijonazo, "The clause ending with よう here is describing what end state the criteria are set to achieve. It’s the other よう". I'm assuming then that the 'other よう' is number 2) above.

It seems I can omit ような from this clause altogether, so I'm struggling to understand what extra information it adds to the sentence and in what situations it is necessary/recommended to add it. Maybe some further examples of its use would help.

Answer 1

Sure, you may omit that unnecessary layer. That'll get us "女性が不利になる基準" which is nice and simple.

But for our academic purpose, let's try adding those stuff in between, although they don't really add extra information, starting with "女性が不利になる基準は差別です" for simplicity's sake:

• 女性が不利になる基準は差別です
• 女性が不利になるような基準は差別です
• 女性が不利になるような基準的なものは差別です
• 女性が不利になるような基準的なものみたいな内容は差別です
• 女性が不利になるような基準的なものみたいな内容…そんなもんは差別です

I can go on forever doing this.

I can go on forever doing this kind of stuff.

I can go on forever doing the kind of stuff such as this... but I'll stop here.

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I hope my attempt helps you better understand the effect of these "mystery" stuff. But if you ask me, I don't think it's wise to completely decouple this usage of 様な from the likes of what you claim to be the "appearance" version.

Answer 2

The value of this よう would have been much greater if it adverbially modified some verb, like this.

女性が不利になるように決められた基準

In this case, 女性が不利になる would have more clearly described an intended end state of some concrete action.

This meaning, and thus the value of よう, is almost entirely lost in the adjectival usage in the original sentence because it contains no action that is supposed to have been performed with the described end state in mind but only the final product that ended up having a particular characteristic, making it totally acceptable to read 〜ような基準 as simply “the kind of measures that …” This is why removing ような (corresponding to “the kind of”) doesn’t change the meaning of the phrase much.

However, it doesn’t mean that this よう describes someone’s perception or impression as you seem to have thought it does when you translated it with “appear.” It’s not that something that the measures (基準) do looks in some particular way to someone who is observing them. I commented because I thought if you hadn’t missed this distinction, you probably wouldn’t have thought 基準 might be the subject of なる, which in turn forced you to twist this intransitive verb into a transitive verb like “cause.”

Just for the sake of giving a counterexample, the following would be at least theoretically ambiguous.

女性を不利にするような基準

The distinction in question is not so much between “like” and something else but rather between perception and intended state.