Equal opportunities or equal outcomes?

When TU Delft announced that some of the places at Aerospace Engineering (AE) will be reserved for women, and the Netherlands Institute for Human Rights approved (in Dutch) it, Reddit responded as Reddit usually does: as subtly as a bull (in Dutch) in a China shop. But among all the outrage and exclamation marks, an interesting issue did arise: what do we actually understand in terms of equality?

Supporters of the preferential policy point to a persistent problem. Despite years of efforts, the number of women in technical degree programmes is still low. Assuming that skills are equally divided among men and women, it seems that a skewed ratio like this points to not everybody having the same opportunities. A targeted approach could balance this out.

It is also useful to stress what the new measure is not. It does not automatically give female students priority. They too have to go through a selection process. Furthermore, in line with the criteria, the women who are admitted, like all the candidates, must be able to follow the degree programme. The idea that unsuitable candidates are accepted at the cost of better qualified men is simply not true. This means that we can chuck a significant part of the online indignation in the bin.

But the critics do ask one justifiable question. If a degree programme that has about 20% women needs to be more balanced, what do we do with the degree programmes where men are the extreme minority? Medicine – also a degree with a numerus fixus – consists of 70% to 80% women.

The essence of the issue is not in dividing up the places, but in two differing ideas about fairness

To my mind, the essence of the issue is not in dividing up the places, but in two differing ideas about fairness. The first idea is equal opportunities. Everyone is assessed according to the same rules. Gender, origin or background do not count. The outcome may be unbalanced as long as the procedure is equal.

The second idea is that of equal outcomes, or in any case, a more balanced representation. If the outcome is regularly skewed, this could be a reason to take action. Not because everyone should end up the same, but because the outcome says something about the opportunities that people have had along the way.

Interestingly, medicine shows how complicated this issue can be. While female medicine students and PhD candidates have been the majority for decades, that ‘feminisation’ by the degree programme administrators has emphatically not been seen as a problem (in Dutch) for a long time. Possible explanations could be the gender blindness (in Dutch) in medical education, as well as the fact that male doctors still climb the academic ladder (in Dutch) more quickly than their female colleagues. The last issue in particular shows how hard it is to predict what elements help achieve the desired outcome. A majority of women among students does not automatically lead to a female majority among professors or administrators.

The discussion gets even more complicated if you try to include it in policy. If study places are partly divided on the grounds of gender, you first have to determine what gender actually means. Is it the gender on your passport, your birth gender or your gender identity? Is a trans woman considered a woman for a regulation like this if her official documents have not yet been adapted? And what about non-binary students? Once you start treating people differently according to a particular category, you also have to determine who does and does not fall in that category. I assume that TU Delft has given proper thought to this.

Maybe a specific guideline is needed to break through the persistent imbalance

So maybe a specific guideline is needed to break through the persistent imbalance. But maybe not. So let us in any case be open about the principle that we uphold as once we reserve study places for a particular group, we no longer opt for equal opportunities. We also opt for a certain outcome.

This is where I believe the real issue lies. Not in whether 20%, 25% or 30% of AE students will be female. The real issue is what outcomes we consider desirable and to what extent are we prepared to diverge from equal treatment. This is a complicated philosophical issue that unfortunately is often carried out online by groups of digital thugs and whingers that take it in turns to accuse each other of discrimination, sexism and wokism.

In the meantime, we know of at least one woman that has been assured of a place at AE. To be honest, the chance that she will later be part of a mission to Mars seems more likely than the chance that Reddit reaches a consensus about equality.