“The education system must open doors - not slam them in the face of study motivated young women,” writes Minister for Higher Education Tobias Krantz in a debate article in newspaper Dagens Nyheter today.
This follows critique against that men have had preferential access to popular courses in which their gender is under-represented. This has been the case where the number of candidates with the highest scores are more than there are places, such as education for becoming a veterinarian, dentist, medical doctor or psychologist.
As more female than male candidates have had the highest scores, the consequence has been that men received preferential treatment. This since the Higher Education Act prescribes that a gender quota should be used to separate out applicants with equal qualifications.
The regulatory framework has caused inequality, writes Tobias Krantz. Last year it was almost exclusively women, 95 per cent, who got excluded because of their gender. Those educations where men have dominated has not work in the same way, since the number of applicants have been lower.
Gunnar Strömmer at the ´Centre for Justice´, a non-profit organisation for individual human rights, welcomes the proposal. He represents a group of women who sued the universities after having been removed at admission because of the quota.
“This is joyful, because thousands of young people would avoid being affected by an admission where applicants are sort out by their gender. It is also logical since several courts have already ruled that this kind of admission is unlawful discrimination,” said Gunnar Strömmer, lawyer and executive member at the Centre for Justice, in a press release.
Svea Court of Appeal recently gave 44 women the right to compensation because they had been removed on grounds of gender when applying to veterinary education. Lund University has also been sued by women who are victims of the gender quota when applying for education to become psychologists.