TU/e has employed 35 more female members of academic staff since July last year. This comes as a result of its new hiring policy whereby, in the first 6 months after a vacancy is posted, only women may be hired.
This means that 25 per cent of TU/e’s academic staff are now women. TU/e wants to increase this to 30 per cent within the next five years.
The university states that its new hiring policy has caused the number of female academic employees to increase more than twice as fast as usual. The university’s executive board calls the results ‘encouraging’.
Of the 35 women hired since last July, 29 became university teachers, two became associate professors, and four became professors.
Until this year, TU/e had some of the lowest numbers of female academic staff across all universities in the Netherlands. The university wanted to do something about it, and therefore introduced the new hiring policy. Without this policy, TU/e states that it would take up to twenty years to achieve more balance between the numbers of male and female academic staff.
Criticism
The hiring policy has attracted a lot of criticism. RADAR, an anti-discrimination agency, received dozens of complaints, and the university even had to defend itself to the Netherlands Institute for Human Rights.
‘Not there yet’
President of the university’s executive board, Robert-Jan Smits, says that ‘although these numbers are encouraging, we are not there yet.’
Translation: Rachael Vickerman
Source: Omroep Brabant
Can’t image discrimination was a way to tackle gender disparity in a field that is supposed to be merit base. Leave it to TUe to come up with ethically questionable policies.