To quote philanthropist Melinda French Gates: “If you invest in women, they invest in everyone else.”
Nevertheless, in Israel in 2025, women are still far from achieving full financial and social equality. Reaching that goal will require sustained effort and systemic change.
Israeli society places a strong emphasis on family values – resulting in tight-knit communities and robust social support. But these same values can also reinforce traditional gender roles. Women are still expected to prioritize family over career, while men are seen as primary breadwinners. This societal norm has real consequences.
It’s no surprise, then, that women in Israel earn just 70% of what men do on average – even among those with high levels of education and experience. Women continue to be underrepresented in positions of influence across politics, technology, medicine, academia, and other key sectors. Representation is even lower among marginalized groups, including Ethiopian, haredi (ultra-Orthodox), and Arab women.
These numbers reflect deep-seated biases that persist: the ideas that women’s careers are secondary, that female leadership is an exception, or that women only work seriously until family obligations intervene. Representation of women at decision-making tables is at a historic low.
Invest in women, invest in a better society
And yet, research clearly shows that when women succeed, society benefits.
Educated women raise educated children. Female executives create job opportunities for other women. Women in academia drive scientific discovery – even though they remain a minority in most STEM departments.
At Tel Aviv University (TAU), female faculty have achieved world-changing breakthroughs in medicine, engineering, law, and beyond. Their work has led to life-saving cancer treatments, groundbreaking environmental technologies, impactful legal rulings, and tens of millions of dollars in start-up investments. And they’ve done all this while representing just 33% of senior faculty, despite women making up 58% of TAU’s PhD students.
Thankfully, TAU is actively investing in its community of brilliant women through appointments, scholarships, mentoring, and support networks. Two of the university’s four vice presidents and four of its nine deans – including those of Medicine, Exact Sciences, and Management – are women.
Support for women on campus spans the full academic journey.
From financial aid for students with children to targeted fellowships, such as the Ariane de Rothschild Women’s Doctoral Program, TAU helps women balance academic excellence with family life. The TAU Presidential Postdoctoral Fellowship for Women supports outstanding female PhD graduates pursuing international postdocs – a near prerequisite for faculty roles in Israel.
TAU also cultivates peer and mentor networks that equip women with tools for success. Programs including Women in Medicine (for medical students), the Ruth Rappaport ExactShe – Meduyakot mentoring framework (for women in STEM), and Yazamiot (for female student entrepreneurs) offer hands-on experience, guidance, and a supportive community.
Recently, TAU hosted its second Women’s Leadership Conference, welcoming 200 accomplished female alumni. Together, we explored what it means to lead – as women, as feminists, and as change-makers in Israeli society. We learned how to advocate for one another, share knowledge, and build lasting professional connections.
We are far from done. Under the leadership of Prof. Neta Ziv, TAU’s vice president for Equity, Diversity, and Community, the university is launching a new campus-wide initiative to expand gender-related support and strengthen gender studies. This initiative aims to embed gender equity deeper into campus life by fostering a vibrant community of scholars, advocates, and future leaders committed to lasting change.
TAU is proud to lead by example, identifying and addressing gender inequity at its root.
We believe the role of academia is not just to reflect society, but to help shape it for the better. Afik in Academia – a female professors’ forum initiated at TAU that has grown into a fruitful collaboration between all universities and colleges in Israel – encourages equality for women researchers and their roles in senior management positions. It rightly stresses that gender equality is essential for academic excellence because it promotes diverse thinking and leads to scientific innovation and creative problem-solving.
Thus, investing in women is not only just but also smart. It’s the type of investment that benefits us all.All this costs money, philanthropic money, yet the reality is that less than 2% of donations in Israel (and even in the US) are going to women’s and girls’ causes. This distressingly low figure demonstrates the hard work ahead to reconsider philanthropic giving through a gender lens, especially among women philanthropists.
How about we begin today?
The writer is chair of the Tel Aviv University Board of Governors, a co-founder of the Institute for Law and Philanthropy at TAU, and a feminist.