EUR delays its target figure for women professors

In the coming years, many more women professors must be appointed at Dutch universities. Most universities want at least twenty percent of their professors to be women in 2020. Erasmus University wants a quarter of its professors to be women in 2025, but there’s still a long way to go in Rotterdam.

At the end of 2014, only 9.5 percent of the 117 professors at EUR were women. This puts the university at the bottom of the list, with only TU Eindhoven and Wageningen behind it. In 2014, only 17 percent of all the professors in the Netherlands were women. In the coming years, this must increase to nearly 26 percent. However, this is not enough. The Women Professors Monitor sets the target at thirty percent in 2020, a figure also used by the European Union.

EUR is taking its time

Amazingly, EUR is the only university planning to achieve its target in 2025. All the others will do so five years earlier. Not all universities are finding it equally hard to achieve the target, however. For example, Radboud University in Nijmegen is striving for a quarter of its professors to be women, while its current number is over 23 percent.