Dutch universities blocked from using gender quotas in admissions

Universities in the Netherlands cannot employ preferential admissions policies on the basis of gender, the country’s education inspectorate has stated, after a top engineering institution attempted to implement a quota for women in an incoming class.

In January, Delft University of Technology announced that women would comprise 30 per cent of the intake to its bachelor’s programme in aerospace engineering, beginning in September 2024. In previous years, women had consistently made up about a fifth of the programme’s cohort, Joris Melkert, the faculty’s director of education, told Times Higher Education. “That’s not a healthy situation,” he said.

This year, the aerospace engineering degree received 2,900 applications for 440 available places. “From that rather luxurious situation, we thought we could afford to give a little bit of preference to female candidates without loss of quality,” Professor Melkert said.

“Over the last 30 or 40 years we’ve done everything you can think of to create a better balance, but it didn’t work,” he added, citing efforts including high school outreach initiatives and the promotion of female role models. “This was more or less a last resort.”

The university was subsequently informed by the Dutch Inspectorate of Education, which operates under the purview of the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science, that the proposed policy was not legally permitted, a move Professor Melkert called “quite a disappointment”.

Gender quotas exist elsewhere in the Netherlands, he noted: legislation passed in 2021, for instance, states that at least a third of the seats on the supervisory boards of listed companies must be held by women. “I hope the new government will reconsider this and adjust the law, or give us an experimental status or something like that,” he said.

Speaking to THE, a spokesperson for the inspectorate said that according to the Dutch Higher Education and Scientific Research Act, universities can only select students on the basis of qualitative selection criteria (such as academic grades), an unweighted lottery, or a combination of both. The Netherlands’ constitution also prohibits discrimination on the grounds of gender, they added.

The inspectorate’s instruction to TU Delft “applies to all universities and other institutions of higher education as well”, the spokesperson said. “Whether and how preference policies can be integrated into selection procedures in the future is a question for the next government and requires careful consideration and societal debate on whether other means might be more effective in promoting equal opportunities in education.”

A new government is yet to be formed after last year’s elections, which saw Geert Wilders’ far-right, anti-Islam Freedom party win the most parliamentary seats. Efforts to form a coalition are under way, with Mr Wilders recently conceding that he lacked the support to become prime minister.

Last month, the current education minister Robbert Dijkgraaf said in a letter to parliament that he agreed with the “underlying idea of corrective selection”, but acknowledged it was “currently not legally permitted”.

“Further tightening of the social task of institutions and a vision on the challenges mentioned above is up to the next government,” he wrote.

The Netherlands lags behind other Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development countries in its share of women graduates in science, technology, engineering and mathematics subjects: in 2019, the OECD average was 32 per cent, compared with 30 per cent in the Netherlands.

emily.dixon@timeshighereducation.com