A matter of time: differential enactments of institutional time in diversity policy documents

Funding

As European universities are required to have a public gender equality plan to compete for funding from 2022 onwards, the Dutch government launched a national diversity action plan in 2020. The plan stimulates universities to develop policies for gender (advancement of women in academia and the integration of gender in research) and ethnicity (research on the lack of study success of students of colour and funds to enable their start as PhD-students). Dutch diversity policies mostly converge around gender inequality. In those instances that ethnic diversity is mentioned, it is mostly presented in terms of deficiencies (Bonjour, Van den Brink, and Taartman ). Such differences in how gender and ethnicity are perceived in diversity policy emerge from their different political historicities in which notions of progress play a crucial role. In the Dutch self-image gender is imagined as part of an almost completed emancipation project, while ethnic minorities deemed in need of Dutch help to become emancipated (Ghorashi ; Wekker ). As such, these historicities entail a particular politics of time that may shape how gender and ethnicity are imagined differently in diversity documents.