Advancement of women in science continues
More and more female scientists are working at Dutch universities. Proportionally, there are now as many female university lecturers as female doctoral students employed.
This is according to the latest figures on personnel at Dutch universities. Of all doctoral students, 44.5 percent are women and the same is now true for university lecturers.
More and more professors and associate professors are also women: 27 percent and 32 percent, respectively.
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The increase also appears to be a little faster than before. Over the last decade, the percentage of female professors has increased by 12 percentage points. In the decade before that, it was 8 percentage points.
This is partly due to the efforts of PvdA Minister Jet Bussemaker, who in 2017 asked universities to appoint an additional 100 women as professors that year. That number came on top of the targets that universities had already set.
Still, there are universities where the proportion of female professors declined last year. This happened at both the front runner, the Open University, and the one at the bottom, TU Delft, although at the latter university, you have to look behind the decimal point to see the decline. Besides, the share of female professors decreased only at Radboud University Nijmegen.
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Universities have set targets for the proportion of female professors in 2025. They did so last year at the request of the National Network of Female Professors. According to the network's forecasts, only Wageningen, Delft and the University of Amsterdam could have trouble meeting their targets.
