The rise of women in science continues

This is apparent from the latest figures on the staff of Dutch universities. Of all doctoral students, 44.5% are women and the same is now true for university professors.

An increasing number of professors and associate professors are also women: 27% and 32% respectively.

Also, the increase seems to be going a bit faster than before. Over the past ten years, the percentage of female professors has increased by 12 percentage points. In the previous ten years, it was 8 percentage points.

This is partly due to the effort by PvdA Minister Jet Bussemaker, who asked universities in 2017 to appoint 100 more women as professors that year. This number was in addition to the objectives that the universities had already set themselves.

Nevertheless, there are also universities where the proportion of female professors has decreased over the past year. This happened at the favorite, the Open University, as well as at the last, TU Delft. At the technical university, you have to look behind the comma to see the decrease. Furthermore, the proportion of female professors has only decreased at Radboud University Nijmegen.

Universities have targets determined for the proportion of female professors in 2025. They did so last year at the request of the National Network of Female Professors. According forecasts of the network, only Wageningen, Delft and the University of Amsterdam might struggle to reach their target figure.