Corlien van Dam, HR Policy Advisor at the Department of Personnel and Organization, considers the Women Professors Monitor a valuable annual publication. She has Diversity & Inclusion in her portfolio, and it is her task to increase the diversity of the TU/e staff in its totality. “It has been proven that a diverse environment creates better output. There is nothing wrong with our international diversity, but the gender ratio still needs to improve.”

This year’s monitor shows that between 2011 and 2017, the number of female PhD students has increased, from 0.7 percent to 27.3. “That’s great, but it does not make us happy yet. The percentage of women needs to be higher,” says Van Dam.

Business sector

Van Dam’s colleague Angelique Wouters (HR Analytics) observes that the Women Professors Monitor 2018 does not include PhD students who are not on the university’s payroll, and that’s quite a large group at TU/e. “There are many PhD students who get paid by the business sector, or who work at our university with a scholarship, the so-called NOP’s (Not On Payroll). In 2017, this applied to six hundred out of fifteen hundred in total. If we include the NOP’s, the number of female PhD students is almost 31 percent.”

Target figures

About five years ago, TU/e set targets for the year 2020 for the number of female personnel in the following categories: 35% UD’s (assistant professors), 25% UHD’s (associate professors) and 20% full professors. “We’re still far removed from that number,” says Van Dam, “but the latest annual figures show an increase of three percent compared to 2017, from twelve to fifteen female full professors. Fortunately, that didn’t affect the number of female associate professors, which stayed at 16 percent. We have also seen a proportional increase in the number of female assistant professors, from 26 to 28 percent.”

No such figures for PhD students exist as of yet, but Van Dam expects that this will be discussed next spring, when the Diversity Commission, chaired by Eva Demerouti, will set the new target numbers. “It’s so important that we keep monitoring the increase of women’s representation. We already asked the deans and departmental boards to encourage women, or at least to talk to them about their reasons for staying or leaving the academic community. Now, we are going to discuss whether new initiatives are necessary, and if so, which ones.”

Not a good sign

Minister of Education Ingrid van Engelshoven does not intend to find out why women take their PhD’s less often than men. Only if this trend continues will the minister consider further analysis. Too late, says Anne de Vries, president of PNN (PhD Representation in the Netherlands). She believes there is more than enough reason to look into the causes at once. “The percentage of women has been dropping for six consecutive years now. If you strive for equal gender representation, that is not a good sign.”

There are several possible reasons for the decrease, and not all of them are necessarily worrisome, says De Vries. “Perhaps there are more foreign PhD students now, and perhaps there are more men among them than women. That says more about the academic culture in some other countries than about the Netherlands. Or perhaps more funding went to beta science, which generally attracts more men.”

But other reasons for the decrease would be worrisome. For instance, if a career in academics is becoming less attractive to women. “Or worse, if it becomes more difficult for women than for men to obtain a PhD position. That’s something you really want to rule out, and we can’t do that at this point.”