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Share of female professors, in the Netherlands and EU countries

data publication
18 December 2020
Women Academic careers professors
In this data publication we show the national and international data on the the share of female professors. For the Netherlands it is split up by university, scientific area and university medical center.

In short

  • Scientific publications written by women have increased over the years.
  • Most recent figures show that the share of female authors for Dutch publications is 32.9%.
  • In the Netherlands, publications in the Health sciences are most often written by women.

March 8 is International Women's Day. Do you want to know more about women in academia? Check out our 'Women in academia' page.


Share of female professors by university medical center

Analysis
The general broad universities have a higher share of female professors than average. The technical universities have a relatively small proportion of female professors.

The monitor on female professors, published by the Dutch network of female professors, presents data on female professors at the university medical centers. The average share of female professors at these centers was 26.2% (24.9% in 2019), which is a bit higher than the average of female professors at the universities. The share varies between 22.2% and 30.5%. Compared to 2019, the share of female professors increased the most at Erasmus MC by 3.7 percentpoints. 

Over the past ten years, the share of female professors in the Netherlands shows a steady increase among all scientific areas. Since 2016, the Humanities and Behavioral sciences, as well as Law are the only scientific areas in which over a quarter of the professors (in fte) is female. The lowest share of female professors can be found in the scientific fields Economics and Natural sciences with percentages of 14% and 16.8%, respectively. 
 

Share of female professors in EU countries in 2016

Analysis
Compared to the EU countries, the Netherlands has a relatively low share of female professors (based on 2016 data). Of the countries in the figure only Belgium has a lower share of female professors. But the Czech Republic, Luxembourg, and Cyprus (countries not presented in the figure) also have a lower share of female professors than the Netherlands.