(This article is translated from Dutch. The original is here)
The board of Leiden University announced last year that there was going to be an inquiry into an “unjust” pay gap at a faculty it then refused to name. Now, it apparent that both the faculties of Science (FWN) and Behavioral Sciences (FSW) had such a pay gap.

“At FSW and FWN there is a difference in pay, meaning that men and women are rewarded differently, when adjusted for age”, the board writes in a memo. “This is especially notable for FSW, because no such difference existed in earlier years.”

 The word“Different” used here really does mean “less”, university spokeswoman Caroline van Overbeeke clarifies, when asked.

Position

There also appear to be differences at other faculties. At the faculties of Law and Governance & Global Affairs, female professors earned less then the men, but in these cases that was “completely due to the fact that more men than women have a so-called 'Hoogleraar-1' position”, the board's memo states.

 At Leiden University, professors start out as as a “Hoogleraar-2”, but excellent work in research, teaching or getting grants means they can level up to “Hoogleraar 1”, which involves a bigger salary. So if more men get this promotion, men earn more than women. At the FWN and FSW, women earned less then men, even at the same level of hoogleraar-ness.

The faculty of Archaeology doesn't have enough professors to allow for a valid comparison. At the faculty of Humanities, the pay gap was relatively small, “making it hard to draw statistically robust conclusions”, according to the memo.

The pay gap among professors, corrected for age, function category and function level, was bigger in 2018 than in 2016. The university board calls this a “worrying development.”

Critical look

To compensate, nine female professors have received an additional payment or raise. These women work at all four faculties that showed a pay gap, Van Overbeeke says. No changes in salary are made for non-professor staff members, because there are “hardly” any pay gaps there, the board writes.

To prevent similar differences from arising in the future, “a meeting has been had with every faculty, in which at an individual level and using a list, it was compared which women earned relatively little compared to their male peers.” The board also things that just correcting the salaries does not go far enough: “We will also have a critical look at selection criteria and the amount of space for negotiation when hiring new professors.”