Bye bye bias?

Will WUR achieve having at least 30 per cent female full professors by 2025?
Henriët Wapenaar of Wageningen’s W&R Couture (which makes the gowns for WUR professors) works on the gown for Lydia Afman, professor of Nutrition Metabolism and Genomics. Photo Guy Ackermans

It’s touch and go whether WUR will achieve the goal it set itself in 2020 of having at least 30 per cent female full professors by 2025. Gender bias still haunts the organization, confirms Executive Board President Sjoukje Heimovaara.

With a little over a year to go until the 30 per cent landmark should be reached, Resource investigated the current m/f distribution in the corps of full professors. A quick count based on the most recent overview of professors on wur.nl and news bulletins about the latest appointments showed that WUR currently has 177 chairholding and personal professors, of whom 49 are women. That is 27.7 per cent.

At the present rate of increase in the proportion of women professors, the goal of 30 per cent will not be reached by 2025. But WUR could still make a final sprint, as there are still six vacancies on the chairholders list**. If they were all filled by women, WUR could pop the champagne corks: the score would be at 30.05 per cent.

No more radical

The chances of that – all the vacant professorships going to women – are minimal, though. Even in the record year of 2022, ‘only’ half of all the appointed professors were women, and after that, the proportion went down again. And WUR does not intend to become more radical in recruiting women professors purely for the sake of reaching that 30 per cent next year, Heimovaara makes clear. ‘It’s always nice to tick the box next to a benchmark, and I will feel a little bit ashamed if WUR doesn’t make it. But this is not about that number. The goal for 2025 was set at that percentage because around 30 per cent is when you reach the critical mass to break through certain patterns, and to experience how nice it is to work in mixed teams. Because we’re talking now about getting more women, but I’d like to emphasize that I’m also strongly convinced of the value of men. You need both.’

I would feel a bit ashamed if WUR didn’t make it

Even if WUR did reach the goal of 30 per cent women professors next year, the job is far from done, says the board President. ‘A little over half our students and PhDs are women now. Among assistant professors, the gender distribution is fairly even too, with 46 per cent women. But it falters when it comes to associate and full professors. That’s where there’s a leak in the pipeline and we need to fix it.’

Emotional amateurism

Ridding the organization of a prejudiced attitude is no easy task, acknowledges Heimovaara. ‘It isn’t a Wageningen thing specifically. Nor is it specifically a man thing against women. It’s deeply rooted in how our whole society looks at men and women.’ By way of illustration, she mentions a column in the Dutch daily paper the NRC, which analyses how events around the resignation of state secretary Achahbar were discussed on the TV talk show Eva. Both the state secretary and minister Heinen, who was accused of making racist statements, showed emotion. The guests at the table called Heinen’s emotion an ‘expression of sincerity’, and that of Achahbar ‘emotional amateurism’. In short, ‘if a woman of colour expresses emotion, she is being hysterical; if a white man does so, he is sincere’, said the NRC. Heimovaara: ‘That is a striking example of how society judges men and women differently, even when they act exactly the same way.’

Heimovaara is convinced that this bias leads to a systematic underestimation of the competencies of women – and of young women especially. And it is a self-fulfilling prophecy. She cites a recent article about job descriptions, of which the Wageningen professor Rens Vliegenthart was a co-author. The study identified clear gender-related differences in the formulation of the job requirements. ‘In the case of male-dominated jobs, qualities like results-orientation or daring were asked for. In the adverts for female-dominated jobs, the researchers saw mainly what they called ‘qualities of warmth’: terms like connecting, supportive, coaching. ‘That’s how society maintains the gender bias itself,’ is Heimovaara’s summary.

I am also strongly convinced of the value of men

In order to minimize the impact of such prejudices, WUR has been working for some time with an external diversity coach on the appointment procedure for new professors. She helps the advisory committees (BACs) to leave as little room as possible for prejudice in the recruitment and selection process, as she explained in an interview with Resource. That means, for example, that all the job interviews are exactly the same in length, structure and context. And that the committee members discuss the suitability of the candidates according to a fixed protocol. This is because it is known that men always get more time to speak than women, so that men’s opinions are inadvertently given more weight. Heimovaara took part in a (mini) training course herself. ‘I felt a bit resistant at first: I’ve been making appointments for 20 years, so surely I shouldn’t have to start hair-splitting over fixed protocols and Excel forms? But I’m a convert. The super-structured approach works extremely well to keep bias at bay as much as possible.’

Not another workshop

Actually, WUR should apply this principle more broadly, Heimovaara believes. Because there’s a big gender bias in the way students evaluate teachers too: women teachers consistently get poorer evaluations than men. And when research proposals are assessed, it once again makes a difference whether they were submitted by Simon or Simone – let alone by Mohammed or Zhiyong. ‘Of course I sometimes have doubts about whether WUR is doing enough,’ says Heimovaara when asked. ‘But we want diversity and social safety and integrity and less work pressure, all while also providing excellent education and research. If people ask with a groan to be excused from yet another workshop, you know that you are approaching the limit of what is feasible, if you want to hold the organization together. Which doesn’t in any way alter our extremely strong commitment to running an inclusive, bias-free university.’

National Monitor
The 2024 edition of the respected National Monitor of Women Professors will be published on 9 December. The Wageningen figures in this report are a bit different to Resource’s due to different reference dates and indicators (e.g. fulltime posts as opposed to staff). The 177 professors mentioned in this article are made up of 89 chairholders, 25 of whom are women, and 89 personal professors, 24 of whom are women. WUR also has special and extraordinary professors (48, 11 women). Because the Monitor doesn’t include these professors, Resource didn’t include them either.


* Reference date 1 September 2024
** The list mentions seven vacant chairs including the Artificial Intelligence chair, to which Ioannis Athanasiadis has since been appointed.

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