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Comment by DanielleMolloy | Hacker News Reader

This one, TU Eindhoven?

https://www.tue.nl/en/news/news-overview/17-06-2019-tue-vaca...

Where did you read about "18 months"? Sounds like "first 6 months" to me. In my experience searching for good academic staff, especially in fields with a lucrative industry takes ages, so I wouldn't be too sure that there will be a strong discriminatory effect when there are not that many women to recruit anyway.

I agree that this move is not the best one. It will end up sending the wrong signals again, which will just lead to backlash on women working in STEM fields. Attacking with opposite discrimination is certainly a bad temporal fix for an existing systematic bias and the tendency of men to downplay competent women.

However, this tendency costs society a lot. It is a fix at least. Someone listened.

I wouldn't expect that they want to make this permanent once things have equaled out a bit.

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I believe I read the article this person is referring to and it did say 18 months: https://www.dutchnews.nl/news/2019/06/eindhoven-university-o...

Even in this article it does not say 18 months.

"If a vacancy fails to attract suitable candidates within six months, it will be opened up to men, and after 18 months the entire scheme will be revised, the university said on Tuesday."

The rule is: For the first 6 months of any recruitment process, only look at female CVs. After this time, also start inviting the men. After 18 months, evaluate the success of this rule and decide whether to follow through for the full 5 years.

For the next 18 months, at least, they will have the following policy; to spend the first the first 6 months after posting each new position trying to fill that new position exclusively with a woman.

So yes, in that article it does say “18 months”. It’s right in the part where it says “18” and “months”.

Did you miss that the post that I replied to claimed that a Dutch university will "only hire women for the next 18 months"?

If you want to be pedantic, dual_dingo wrote that the university wants to (not will) hire only women for the next 18 months, which is a pretty accurate representation of their new policy. So if suitable female candidates show up for every position in the next 18 months, then no male candidates will be hired at all.

It seems like we’ve successfully cleared up any confusion here.

I read an interview with the rector of the university on a reputable german news site (https://www.spiegel.de/lebenundlernen/uni/frauenquote-an-tu-...).

Also, the original source you cited clears says:

> For the next year and a half, this will apply to 100 percent of vacancies, after which the university will review the percentage covered by the scheme each year.

but frankly, I don't really understand what they mean by "in the first six months of recruitment".

Even in that article with its highly click-baity and wrong headline (Spiegel Online has not been "reputable" for long time) they say that 18 months is merely the period after which they want to evaluate their 5-year program.

The interview clearly says that the rule applies to "the first 6 months of recruitment", which in my understanding of the process means "after the job ad is posted".

Btw, imho Dutch people have a tendency for "certainly good enough" solutions because it keeps things moving (instead of perfectionist stagnation whenever confronted with complexity like us germans often do). This 6-month period of only looking at female applicants during recruitment looks like one of those. Nobody says that this will stay the rule forever. Also consider that they will get very few female applicants anyway, so there is still a lot of room for men.

This solution is straight up sexual discrimination. Pure and simple. I can't accept that any solution that is purely discriminatory is "good enough".

I do agree. It also sends the wrong signals.

But try to understand the thinking for a moment:

If no solution is applied at all because people are waiting for the perfect one, there will be continued discrimination against competence. This has costs too.

"Take no action" might not feel like a decision, but it is one and has ill effects.

Is this better than trying a fix for a short period of time that may be mediocre, but is at least effective?

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