This is a guest post by Anthonie Meijers. He is professor of philosophy at Eindhoven University of Technology, and chair of the board of the Dutch Research School of Philosophy.
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There is a serious gender problem in philosophy in the Netherlands. In the 11 departments of philosophy the numbers of permanent staff members are roughly the following: assistant professors: 110, of which 25 are women; associate professors: 45, of which 5 are women; full professors: 65, of which 7 are women (I have not included part-time professors; this data is based on the websites of the departments). You may think that this just indicates that women have to work harder to get advanced positions at Dutch universities (i.e. that the problem is only theirs). But there is sufficient evidence now that a gender bias is built into the system. This implies that men are part of the problem and that they will have to take their responsibility. The solution is not easy though. It requires a package of measures. What can we do?
It is always good to raise awareness, but what really helps is to move beyond awareness-raising with a few very simple institutional measures that can be implemented right away. Why not make it a rule that 30% of all invited speakers at conferences are women, or that 30% of the papers in special issues are by female philosophers? The Board of the Dutch Research School of Philosophy (OZSW) will discuss such measures for activities organized by the OZSW later this year. There may of course be exceptions to this rule, but these exceptions need to be justified. Similarly, we should stick to the rule, formally adopted by many universities, that selection committees should include at least two women.
There are also structural causes that require structural and therefore much more difficult solutions. Universities in the Netherlands get paid for the number of students enrolled in the first year and for the number of bachelor, master and PhD degrees. This makes it much more attractive to bring in doctoral students than to hire postdocs. As a result there are too few postdoc positions available in philosophy. At the same time these positions are crucial for building a career. This is a problem for men, but an even bigger problem for women because they often have children around or after their PhDs. It makes it much more difficult for them to compete with men and this gives them a systematic disadvantage.
And then there is this ridiculously expensive day-time childcare system in the Netherlands, due to which it is sometimes cheaper to stay at home than to earn a salary in a job. In the Netherlands, it is often the woman’s career that gets sacrificed. This can be done very differently. Sweden is a good example, where almost all of women participate in paid jobs and childcare is very well organized and affordable.
These structural causes, however, can never be a reason for Dutch universities not to do more to solve the gender problem. In 2008 most universities signed the Charter Talent to the Top, which aims at a better gender balance in top and sub-top positions in companies, ministries, universities, and so on (see here for a list of universities that signed the Charter). Part of the Charter has been to set clear and measurable targets for the number of women at the associate professor and professor levels and to adopt a strategy for achieving them. This is monitored, then, by an independent committee. Many universities that signed the Charter, however, do not seem to take these targets very seriously, or aim for the easy solution in which disciplines with a large proportion of female professors (say linguistics) compensate for disciplines with a small proportion (say physics). This is not what the Charter tries to achieve.
At Eindhoven University of Technology we approached the existing gender-imbalance differently. After we signed the charter, we first determined the gender balance of the PhD population in various disciplines nationwide and subsequently set discipline-specific targets based on this proportion for positions at the associate and professor level. As a result we all have to strive for a better representation of women and nobody is allowed the easy solution. This has certainly increased the awareness of the challenge. It has also contributed to a willingness to accept unusual solutions, such as granting talented women on a tenure track towards a professorship temporary advantages so that they can meet the targets of their tracks quicker.
Why do we do this? For a substantial part, out of well-understood self-interest. We discovered that we lost too much talent in the engineering sciences because we solely aimed to attract male students with an intrinsic interest in technology. That is only a small part of the student population. Students who are interested in technology because it can solve societal problems are a much larger group. This larger group contains a substantial number of female students. But to attract them we had to do two things: (i) to change our educational programs and put a lot more social science and humanities in them, and (ii) to have more female role models in the higher positions at our university. This explains our gender policy, but only up to a point. I also believe that many staff members felt deeply ashamed by the terrible gender imbalance, including those at top positions of our university.
Now if we apply the Eindhoven gender approach to philosophy in the Netherlands we get the following. There are currently roughly 115 philosophy PhD students, of which 50 (43%) are women (data based again on the departments’ websites). This means that the targets for women in the associate professor and full professor categories should be above 40%. This proportion is currently 8% and 10% respectively, implying that there is a huge difference. We need a strategy to bridge this gap.
The main problem concerns critical mass. There is a widely endorsed view (Moss Kanter 1977; Dee 2004; Carell, Page &West 2010) that if a minority-group consists of 30-35% of the total group, many of the negative effects following from implicit bias or stereotyping will significantly diminish. If that is true, it justifies temporary advantages for women until this critical mass has been attained.
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