Female doctoral students and university teachers throughout Europe can justifiably complain about the 'glass ceiling', but most of all Dutch women. Such is the conclusion of an EU-report on sex discrimination in science.
In all thirty countries that were studied, women have a lower chance of advancing professionally in academics than their male counterparts. If they do advance, they take longer and many of them give up at all levels, reports the Helsinki-group for women and science, who conducted the study.
The closer to the top, the lower the share of women. In the Netherlands in 2000, 22 percent of the university teachers were female, 11 percent of the university senior lecturers and only 6 percent of the professors.
The Netherlands is at the bottom of the list, not far behind Ireland and Denmark (7 percent female professors). Chances are higher in Sweden and Hungary (both 13 percent), Estonia and France (both 15 percent), Poland (17 percent) and Finland (20 percent).
The majority of European students, however, are female, although in the Netherlands that number is a bit lower at 48 percent. Still, this marks a considerable increase since 1970, when one in five students was female.
Although more and more woman are employed at Dutch universities, with budget cuts and restructuring in the eighties and nineties, newcomers - many of whom were women - were the first to go. Consequently the European Union still calls the under-representation of women at Dutch universities and research institutes problematic.
'Brussels' did not put sex discrimination on the agenda just out of sympathy with women in science. In March 2002 the European Council in Lisbon expressed the ambition to become 'the most competitive and dynamic knowledge economy in the world'. With that objective in mind, the EU cannot afford to lose female scientific talent. Thus the Helsinki-group proposes making equal opportunities for men and women an important criterion while distributing the 17.5 billion Euro research funds for the Sixth Framework Program (2003-2006).
