Gender professor Yvonne Benschop spoke to a room full of people this afternoon, in honour of international women’s day. She discussed gender equality issues, like the 7 percent wage difference between men and women and the effects of quota.

The Netherlands is doing extremely poorly when it comes to the number of female professors. The only European countries lower on the list are Latvia, The Czech Republic and Cyprus. This is one of the problems discussed by professor Yvonne Benschop, during a lecture in honour of international women’s day this afternoon.

The room is almost completely filled when the lecture starts. Many of the visitors are women, some men have showed up to listen as well. When moderator Claudia Krops opens the afternoon, she takes the crowd through some of the international women’s day news. Minister Schippers of public health, reserves 12 million Euros for research on female health issues. This good news follows with the slightly annoyed remark that, when meat processing company Hilckmann went bankrupt recently, local paper De Gelderlander wrote an article on the fact that it is led by two women.

When professor Yvonne Benschop climbs the stage, she does not sugar coat it: ‘I am not coming here with good news.’ She does start to say that of course, improvements are visible if you compare what we have now with what we had in the past. ‘But you have to go decades back to see real differences with today. A lot is going wrong, still.’ Among those things are horizontal and vertical sex segregation, and the difference in wages (7 percent in governmental jobs, even worse in companies).

Female mayors
According to the annual ranking from the Dutch Network of Female Professors (LNVH), the Netherlands are among the worst-achieving countries in improving the number of female professors. If you look within the Netherlands, Radboud University was once the institution that had the most women in a professor position, but Open University and Leiden University now have more. But Benschop does not limit herself to academics. She also researched the percentage of female mayors (22) and the percentage of top directors at the police (30). This last percentage is surprisingly high, she says. ‘I am going to say the Q word, to get it over with,’ Benschop says. ‘But the police has worked with quota and as you can see, it works.’

Benschop gives several reasons for the differences. She asks how many people in the crowd believe that gender equality is a matter of time. Nobody raises their hand. ‘You see,’ Benschop says, ‘nobody believes that.’ One of the most important things we need to realize, she says, is that ambition is social, not individual: ‘Career is ambition plus applause. A woman’s surroundings usually focuses on ambitions in care and leisure rather than on ambitions in career. This is different for men.’ Her advice is that women scout other female talent and support other women in their career. ‘Then someone can do that for you as well.’ / Jozien Wijkhuijs