Linda Duits Few professors

The patriarchy,

but also the system

There are plenty of female students, but most girls still don’t manage to become professors. What extraordinary mechanism perpetuates this?

As a student, feminism did not interest me. These were the 1990s. Second-wave feminism had just died down and the prevailing notion was that the remaining gender inequality would automatically be rectified. Everything would be different for my generation.

Feminism was therefore an old-fashioned word, something that no intelligent young woman identified with. ‘Women’s Studies’, which also sounded rather stale, was a marginal field within political science at the University of Amsterdam. The lecturers there slightly increased the proportion of women in political science. Except for one female professor, political science was mainly a white men’s sport. But I didn’t worry about it, because the balance among the students was pretty even. This would all work out.

After obtaining my degree, I started my PhD research in Communication Studies. Not only was this a girls’ discipline, but also a fairly new one. There were plenty of female staff. Well, many more than in other fields. I considered that evidence for the promise that more women in science was just a matter of time. I learned to think about this better during my PhD research, not

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least because my PhD supervisor was a woman and because I started to explore Gender Studies, its new name. I recognized a surprising phenomenon within communication science. Although the proportion of female students was higher among undergraduates and approximately equal among PhD students, men started to dominate at the assistant professor/postdoc level and, once among professors, men were in the majority.

That was a reason to be despondent. Science was aware of the problems. Staff members were convinced that this was unacceptable.

It is more about self-interest than the struggle for emancipation

So, what extraordinary mechanism perpetuated this? Structural sexism, said Willem Schinkel in 2017 in an article for Vers Beton. Using his characteristic sharp pen, he criticized the ‘patriarchal nomination of ‘crown princes’. According to him, this is a form of academic homophilia, whereby male professors systematically promote their academic sons to professorship.

In addition to Schinkel, innumerable colleagues in our own country and abroad have studied gender inequality at universities. After all, scientists like writing about science. That is why this topic always evokes my irritation. It is more about self-interest than the struggle for emancipation to fight for more female professors.

You could also call it typical white feminism. White women tend to look no further than

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their own noses. That is why childcare and the shortage of top business women are always hot issues. In doing so, they don’t address the differences in experience that exist between women. Differences not just in colour, but also in class, age, ability, sexuality and religion, for example. Inequality looks different when you wear a headscarf or are a lesbian.

The new generation of feminists is very committed to – in jargon – intersectionality. I agree with them that much more attention should be paid to joining forces and listening to each other’s stories. At the same time, I think that it is important that we do not perpetuate the myth that the second wave of feminism was only white. Black, migrant and refugee women were also involved, and made their presence at universities known.