More female professors, RUG mediocre
Door Rob Siebelink
By Rob Siebelink
So says the Monitor Women Professors 2019, published by the Dutch network of Women Professors (LNVH). Last year’s increase was the largest ever in the Netherlands: an average of 2.2 percentage points.
Men are still overrepresented in the highest echelons of science, though, and the Netherlands are in 24th place out of the twenty-eight EU countries, the network says. The LNVH calculated that equality won’t be reached until 2042.
A total of 3,350 professors have a position at Dutch universities. Of those, 2,605 are male and 745 are female. At the end of 2018, 125 professors were added, ninety-four of whom were female, thirty-one male.
Yardstick
In 2017, the RUG’s percentage of female professors was 19.6. In 2018, this increased to 21.7 percent, a 2.1 percentage point rise. That’s less than the average Dutch increase, which the LNVH says is an important yardstick: even traditional ‘male strongholds’ like the technical universities in Eindhoven and Twente are doing better than the Groningen university.
The RUG wants a quarter of all professors to be female in 2020, but whether the university will succeed remains to be seen. Of the fourteen Dutch universities, the RUG is only in eighth place, together with the University of Tilburg.
The Open University had the best score in the monitor: its percentage of female professors increased from 30.1 percent to 34.7 percent. Interestingly enough, the Erasmus University in Rotterdam is at the complete bottom (from 13.5 percent in 2017 to 14.5 in 2018), below even the technical universities.
Overfishing
The monitor also showed that the number of female associate professors has actually decreased. It’s possible that this is a direct result of the increase in the percentage of female professors, the LNVH suspects.
‘We should pay attention to the overfishing in the pool of female associate professors’, the network says, calling on universities to not just focus on the percentage of female professors, but to remain aware of promoting people from assistant professor to associate professor. The LNVH also says that women still make less money than most of their male counterparts.