Aletta Jacobs chairs: 15 female professors
Aletta Jacobs chairs: 15 female professors
Door Rob Siebelink
By Rob Siebelink
On International Women’s Day in March, rector Cisca Wijmenga said that in an effort to catch up, the UG would be creating fifteen Aletta Jacobs chairs specifically for women. The number was later increased to seventeen.
The UG’s number of female professors has been below average for years now. The Women Professors Monitor 2020, which was published last week, has the UG and the University of Tilburg in shared seventh place; 23 percent of the university’s professors are female. The average percentage of the fourteen Dutch universities is 24.2 percent.
Extra steps
Earlier, the UG acknowledged that it wasn’t catching up fast enough, and that without taking extra steps, the university would not reach its goal to have one in three professors be female by 2025. As such, it created the new chairs, which were quickly filled. This development was not included in the most recent Monitor.
The new professors are distributed across five faculties. There are three new positions at the Faculty of Economics and Business, two at the Faculty Spatial Sciences, three at the Faculty of Law, two at the Faculty of Behavioural and Social Sciences, and three at the UMCG.
Rector Cisca Wijmenga said: ‘We were able to fill the positions relatively quickly, even though appointing new professors is a lengthy process. That shows that there is no shortage of female candidates. I’m confident in the UG’s ambitions for 2025.’
Active policy
Dutch universities have been pursuing an active policy for years in an effort to attract more female professors, to varying degrees of success. The Association of Universities in the Netherlands says the percentage of female professors has increased by 6 percent over the past four years.
The goal is for 31 percent of professors to be female by 2025. The Open University is the only one who has already far surpassed this target; 40 percent of professors there are female. Wageningen University, the University of Twenty, and the Delft and Eindhoven Universities of Technology are still quite far behind, as they’re all below 20 percent. When it comes to research universities, the Erasmus University of Rotterdam has the lowest percentage, at 21.