The bill expanding gender segregation in Israeli higher education goes to its final readings in the Knesset this week, after clearing the Education Committee. Until now, the Supreme Court and the Council for Higher Education allowed segregation as a narrow exception: undergraduate degrees, the ultra-Orthodox community, inside the classroom only, and with an explicit ban on discriminating against women lecturers.

This bill extends the permission to master’s and doctoral programs. It opens segregation to any population that asks for it. And it reaches past the lecture hall into clinical placements and direct patient care. The exception is becoming policy, and once segregation is written into primary legislation rather than resting on a court ruling, stopping it becomes far harder.

The bill’s sponsor, MK Limor Son Har-Melech, says the law will let women break through a glass ceiling. Yet by the Council for Higher Education’s own figures, roughly two-thirds of the students from ultra-Orthodox schooling now in Israeli higher education are women.

Last week, the journalist Chen Artzi-Sror revealed in Ynet a study on gender segregation that the Council for Higher Education itself had commissioned. It examined segregated master’s programs in psychology and art therapy for the ultra-Orthodox community, and asked whether such programs had any real value, and whether anyone actually wanted them. The findings were clear. Mixed-gender learning has distinct value in the therapeutic professions, and separation can cause professional harm. Above all, the intended beneficiaries themselves responded warmly to the idea of studying without segregation. The report was submitted in 2024. It never came before the Council’s plenum, and it never reached the Knesset committee that debated the bill. The vote is being held without the findings of the study the Council itself ordered.

This has a price, and not only a moral one. A small country that lives on research, medicine and technology cannot afford to waste talent. Broad segregation means running the system twice over: faculty used inefficiently, teaching and research narrowed to fit whoever is sitting in front of them. Instead of an open market of expertise, the system learns to sort by gender. Who may teach whom. Who is in the room. Who is asked to wait outside.

And the cost does not fall only on the women who study. It falls on the women who teach. A lecturer who cannot be assigned to a segregated track loses courses, and a teaching load is not an abstraction: it is a salary, a promotion file, a career. The Supreme Court understood this, which is why its ruling barred discrimination against........

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