Guido Camps (35) is a vet and a postdoc at the Human Nutrition department. He enjoys baking, beekeeping and unusual animals.
So I am shocked by the news from the University of Eindhoven: ‘Women researchers get priority at TU/e from now on’. Newly appointed women academics get 100,000 euros for their own research, plus a special mentoring programme. What a fabulous offer! If my daughters were not one and four years old, I would be taking them to Eindhoven today so they could apply.
There are only two possible explanations for the shortage of women academics in Eindhoven: either there are too few women in the sciences, or women applicants are being systematically kept out by appointments committees. Rector Frank Baaijens assumes the latter: ‘We are progressing too slowly. We are aware that we are dealing with an implicit gender bias.’
What the rector is saying really is: our professors and deans are so discriminatory in their appointments policy that the only solution is to only let them interview women candidates, so they don’t get any chance to appoint a man.
Dear Executive Board at TU/e, if your problem lies in a gender bias among your staff, sack all staff with a gender bias1 and appoint a more diverse group of staff instead. After all, you have said yourselves that they are the problem, and not all the young male academics who are to be kept out of Eindhoven for the foreseeable future.
1 But surely you are not allowed to sack someone just like that in the Netherlands? True, but a university that is not afraid of Article One of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Dutch constitution won’t lose sleep about labour laws either.