UvA meets target: Thirty per cent female professors at UvA for first time
A significant achievement for the UvA. By the end of 2023, for the first time more than 30 per cent of professors at the university is female. Those figures come from the annual report of the National Network of Women Professors (LNVH). With this, the UvA has met its own target for 2025.
LNVH reports annually on the number of female students, graduates, PhD students, university lecturers and professors at all Dutch universities. Figures from that monitoring report now show that the UvA had a percentage of female professors of 30 per cent for the first time by the end of 2023. A year earlier, the university scored 28.4 per cent on that same statistic. Tilburg University also passed the 30 per cent mark for the first time in 2023.
Compared to the other universities in the country, the 2023 numbers place UvA in the middle of the pack. Of the 14 educational institutes included by LNVH in the report, the UvA ranks seventh. The average percentage of female professors in The Netherlands is 28.7 per cent.
Target number
By exceeding the 30 per cent norm, the UvA meets its self-imposed target for 2025. In 2015, the university imposed on itself that by 2020, a quarter of professors should be women. When that succeeded, the CvB decided that the proportion should rise to 30 per cent by 2025. This does not put the UvA among the most ambitious universities in the country. Among others, Maastricht University, Leiden University, Utrecht University, VU Amsterdam and Radboud University Nijmegen chose a higher target. However, the UvA is one of only four universities that has already reached its own 2025 target. Based on last year's development, LNVH has prepared a forecast for the end of 2025. The UvA is expected to reach 33 per cent by then.
The highest percentage of female professors is achieved by the Open University: 42.6 per cent. However, it should be noted that the number of full professors at the Open University is by far the lowest of all. By comparison, the number of fte professors at the Open University was 47.2 at the end of 2023, while at the UvA it is 318 fte. The report also looks at the percentage of female PhDs in different fields of science. For instance, of all PhD students in the field of law at the UvA, no less than 77.3% are women. The highest percentage of all universities.
If all 14 universities achieve the target number they have set for 2025, at least a quarter of professors at each university will be women. Furthermore, according to LNVH's report, the national average would then be such that one in three professors would be female. This would reach the point of critical mass, which occurs when a development is so advanced that it is self-sustaining and reinforcing.
