A Dutch university’s controversial policy to close the gender gap by temporarily allowing only women to apply for certain roles appears to be paying off.
In 2019, the Eindhoven University of Technology (TUE) announced that for the first 6 months of recruitment for permanent academic jobs, only women applicants would be considered. Now, the university—which specializes in engineering science—has found that in the first 5 years under the new policy, half of new recruits were women, compared with 30% previously.
The results, released earlier this month, are promising, says Yvonne Benschop, an organizational behavior researcher at Radboud University who specializes in workplace diversity. They “debunk old myths about women not being interested or qualified” for particular roles, she says.
TUE’s radical policy was sorely needed, says university President Robert-Jan Smits. The ratio of women professors compared with men in the Netherlands is among the lowest in Europe—and when he began at the institute, Smits was shocked to discover that TUE had the lowest proportion of women professors in the Netherlands. “We were the lowest of the lowest in Europe,” he says. “And that, I felt, was really unacceptable.”
The new policy sparked strong reactions in 2019, with international media coverage as well as harsh criticism in the Dutch press. Complaints about the legality of the program reached the Netherlands Institute for Human Rights, an independent monitoring body. The institute ruled that TUE was pursuing a legitimate goal but using too blunt an instrument. In response, the university adapted the plans in 2021 to apply only to departments and academic ranks where fewer than 30% of the faculty were women. It also reduced the number of women-only positions, which the university has named Irène Curie Fellowships, after Marie Skłodowska-Curie’s Nobel Prize–winning daughter.
Even with these tweaks to the rules, there was a big change in hiring, TUE reports. The university had 614 academic staff members in 2018, before the policy started, 134 of whom were women. That has increased to 208 women out of 711 employees, a jump from 22% to 29%.
The policy is a “necessary but not sufficient step” for gender equality, says Benschop, who chairs the Dutch Network of Women Professors. But the university must “do more than add the women scientists and stir,” she says: They will also need to monitor how well the recruits are absorbed into scientific teams and the wider university community, and address other areas of inequality such as pay and promotion rates among men and women.
TUE is addressing wider issues for women beyond just hiring, Smits says, from campus safety to child care and pay gaps. Ongoing conversations with Irène Curie fellows suggest they are integrating well into their departments, he says.
Smits thinks the fellowships brought about cultural change at the university, with decision-makers forced to look farther afield to find and recruit talented women. Many women were surprised to be headhunted, suggesting they would not have considered themselves qualified and would not have applied on their own, he says. In his experience, women are less likely than men to apply if they meet all but one of a list of job criteria. Because that eliminates many top applicants, he says, actively recruiting women can produce a more diverse workforce without compromising on quality.
The policy may also have helped level the playing field for prospective women candidates, who are more likely than men to have left the workforce temporarily because of caregiving responsibilities, says Nokwanda “Nox” Makunga, a medicinal plant biotechnologist at Stellenbosch University and an advocate for women in science, technology, engineering, and math. This can make women’s resumes appear weaker than men’s, so comparing only women for a role may help even out this disadvantage, she suggests.
Not all departments at TUE have improved evenly. Although women now make up nearly 40% of the Industrial Design faculty, for instance, in other departments the proportion of women still sits at below 20%. The goal is to bring all departments up to 30%, Smits says, at which point a minority becomes “part of the community” and able to grow on its own, because it now has influence within a department. The policy will continue in the departments that fall short of this target. And all new women recruits across the university will receive a grant of €100,000 for research, as well as mentorship to help them build their careers.
