Reported by KaYin Leung and Valentijn Karemaker

EWM in the Netherlands (september 2011 – september 2013)

The Dutch branch of the EWM has only recently established itself as a separate platform for female mathematicians in the Netherlands. EWM-NL now has a mailing list as well as a webpage (www.uu.nl/ewmnetherlands). We hosted our first event on April 26th, consisting of a talk and an extensive discussion session. Currently the local coordinators are considering setting up more local meetings and a mentoring scheme and are working on promoting EWM-NL throughout the Dutch academic community.

Women in mathematics in the Netherlands

The latest data on women in mathematics in the Netherlands were collected and published in 2008 by NWO (the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research) and can be found in the table below.

Table 1: statistics for women in mathematics at universities in the Netherlands

NWO is hoping to publish an updated report in the course of 2013. All other available statistics are much less recent, yet show the Netherlands was at the backend of Europe. Figures for only Utrecht University suggest that the situation has not changed much between 2010 and 2013. Finally, the female members of the EWM-NL mailinglist offer the following statistics:

Table 2: women on the EWM-NL mailinglist

The data show that even though emancipation of women in science in general, and in mathematics in particular, has been given priority on the political agenda for a number of years, not much measurable progress has been made in the number of women in postdoctoral academic positions.

A few tenure track positions have been set up, such as the Rosalind Franklin Tenure-Track Fellowship in Groningen. NWO has several grant programs to encourage women, such as Aspasia2 and MEERVOUD3 : Aspasia (new style) is a scheme to increase the number of women associate professors4 by awarding grants to women who have already secured another NWO grant (Vidi or Vici). MEERVOUD aims to ease the step from postdoc to assistant professor, but seems to have stopped running. NWO is currently looking into further ways of expanding its grant programmes aimed at women in science.

Interestingly, EWM has only five registered members in the Netherlands. Apart from EWM and EWM-NL there are several other organisations for women in science, such as NIMF (http://www.stichtingnimf.nl/), and university specific organisations such as the “women network” (Utrecht University, http://www.fss.uu.nl/vn/).