Politics outside of the UvA face the ongoing struggle to grant a proportional number of female representatives in relation to society. Further, in the workforce, women tend to be underrepresented though how does this play out at our university?

According to our calculations, the Central Student Council (CSR), the Executive Board, and the Executive Staff are on the right track. In the CSR, women are represented to a greater extend as eight out of 13 are female in the council. The same is seen in the Executive Board, which consists of three people––two of them are women. Furthermore, the Executive staff reveals that 64% of the people are female. So far, so good! It seems like our university is doing a great job in bridging the gender gap that is so prominent outside. With the number of female students steadily growing, it makes sense to also see women’s empowerment in the university’s staff. However, looking at the Supervisory Board, the improvement starts to tremble. Here, only two out of five people are female, which shows an underrepresentation of women.

Additional to our own calculations, UvA offers facts and figures on the diversity of students and staff. In this academic year, a slim majority of the students enrolled in UvA’s Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees are female. Another intriguing figure from the year 2020 is the one regarding Academic and Support staff, which shows an equal percentage concerning gender. Nonetheless, taking another look at the employed professors within the previous category, reality’s inequality becomes apparent. In the year 2020, only 24% of UvA’s professors are women. In addition to that, 31% of associate professors represent women in the staff. These findings are interesting, as UvA’s website state: “As of 2019, we aim to have 50% of all vacant professorships filled by women”. This shows that UvA’s promise contradicts the numbers above. So, why the data in 2020 shows different results than the set aim for 2019 remains unexplained.

 

This article is edited as one of the CSR members has quit. Previously the article stated that 9 out fo 14 members are female, this is now corrected to 8 out of 13