The Nijmegen campus is home to more female than male students. And this has been the case for more than thirty years. This is visible on campus, but also in the city. 60 percent of all twenty-year-olds in Nijmegen is female. Enough reasons for Vox to make a special issue about women.

You would expect that the university wrote a line or two about it in its annual report. But in the 1989 report, not a word is said about it. That year, for the first time, the campus counts more female than male students. The tipping point is only visible in the numbers. In 1989, the campus counts 11.931 students, of which 51 percent is female. A turning point, because from then on, the percentage only increases.

Today, female students are a vast majority on the Nijmegen university: 57 percent of all students is female. This has to affect the campus and the city. On campus, men became a rare species at the Faculty of Social Sciences, especially in the psychology programme. At medical sciences, humanities and the law faculty, women are a majority as well.

Outlier

In a small city like Nijmegen, you notice this difference immediately in the city’s population. In Nijmegen, there are 106,7 women for every 100 men. Compare that to the rest of the Netherlands: 101,55 women for every 100 men.

Especially in the 18-25 age group, women are a majority. Twenty-year-olds are the biggest outliers: in Nijmegen, 60 percent of the people in that age group is female. The only other university city that reaches that percentage is Maastricht. In total, about 2400 female twenty-year-olds live in Nijmegen, and 1600 men of that age: for every two men, there are three women.

Among young researchers (PhD’s), the women are still a majority, but with every step up the career ladder of science, the number of women decreases. If you really want to change that, a better climate for female scientists on campus is necessary, says professor Gender and diversity Marieke van den Brink.

City council
There are sixteen women in the Nijmegen city council. This makes sense, you might think, with all the highly educated women in the city. However, it is not true that more women took a seat in the city council when more female students came to the campus. Not at all. Until recently, the Nijmegen city council even had less women than other cities with a majority of female students, like Utrecht, Leiden and Maastricht.

Four years ago, only Eindhoven (20 percent female council members) and Enschede (24 percent) scored lower than Nijmegen. And those cities have a technical university, attended by more men than women.

The Vox women’s special can be found online now, and on campus this week.