Israel’s gender-segregated courses ‘a threat to academic quality’

Efforts to expand gender-segregated courses in Israeli higher education risk harming the country’s academic standing, while failing to benefit the people they were designed to help, according to critics.

Last month Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, passed legislation that will allow universities to offer segregated master’s and doctoral programmes, building on a 2021 High Court ruling that allowed gender segregation in undergraduate degrees – aimed at integrating ultra-Orthodox Jewish students into higher education and the workforce.

Although the previous legislation was established for Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) students only, the new rules expand the option of taking a segregated course to all students.

Five members of the Council for Higher Education quit in response to the new law and the Council of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities said it “constitutes a grave historic mistake whose consequences will be felt for generations”.

Critics have also warned that the change is reflective of an increasingly politicised environment for Israeli higher education as the country heads towards crucial parliamentary elections in October.

Yofi Tirosh, associate professor in the department of law at Tel Aviv University and a campaigner against the legislation, said that the changes risked causing “huge harm” to Israeli higher education.

She said the reforms are “not just a matter of gender equality – although this is a significant part of it – but it’s also a matter of academic freedom and academic quality”.

“In higher education, the core ideals surrounding degrees are about exchanging ideas, collaborating between disciplines, between research groups and labs, going to conferences, thinking freely, and all these things don’t happen when you study with your own group and you are apart from the general campus, and when your entrance might be denied to a co-ed conference.

“The labs will be inferior and the grants will be fewer. So this is the thing: it’s not a law that will serve the ultra-Orthodox community.”

Tirosh warned that the reforms will also “harm Israel’s academic standing in the world”, especially at a time when the country’s academic reputation has faced scrutiny and boycotts as a result of Israel’s war in Gaza. 

The politician sponsoring the legislation, Limor Son Har-Melech, has argued that it will “advance women from sectors that have not received the opportunities they deserve”, while other politicians say it will “expand freedom of choice” for women.

But Tirosh said she feared the legislation would “not broaden the freedom of the women and the men in the ultra-Orthodox community [but] narrow it” due to pressures on students from within the community to choose women-only programmes.

The Knesset has now closed ahead of the upcoming general election, with prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu accused of pushing through a series of controversial laws ahead of its dissolution.

Tirosh said although many assume that a more liberal government would undo the changes should it win the election, it might not be that easy, with the current administration pushing to open the new courses before the poll takes place.

Heather Munro, an anthropologist in the department of Hebrew and Jewish studies at UCL, noted that the Haredi population is becoming “increasingly important to the future of politics in Israel” as the country’s fastest-growing group, with Haredi politicians forming a significant part of Netanyahu’s coalition.

She said “gender segregation only serves to benefit Haredi men”, and questioned claims that the legislation would create better opportunities for religious women, noting that Haredi women have been enrolling in higher education in growing numbers since the 1950s, although these figures have been flatlining since the 2010s.

“In 2010-20, there was heavy criticism of the Haredi men’s-only campuses for further exacerbating a gender equality issue in higher education employment in Israel,” she said, adding that the new legislation “will make this problem even worse”.

The politicians pushing this through the Israeli parliament – Zvi Sukkot and Son Har-Melech – are “connected with far-right parties whose values and theology are both very religiously conservative and very Zionist-expansionist” with “traditional” views on gender roles, and thus “this law likely benefits their communities, and serves their religious and political ideological goals”, Munro added.

juliette.rowsell@timeshighereducation.com