logo
10 March 2010

Equity and women of colour: Things are slow to change in the academy

Audrey Kobayashi, Queen’s University
Guest Contributor

Women of colour remain severely underrepresented in Canadian academia. Notwithstanding employment equity policies that have been in place for at least two decades in most universities, they are still hired at levels way below their availability in the PhD pool in most disciplines. And those who make it into the hallowed halls consistently report that they experience consistent, debilitating, everyday racialization that places them at a disadvantage in comparison to their whiter peers, male or female.

We need to look both at the adverse systemic barriers to the full participation of all members of the academy and at the everyday conditions under which women of colour navigate the academy. All under-represented groups face systemic barriers. These include a lack of mentoring, reproduction of power structures, and the failure to address the normative basis of curricula and research programs.

As a result, those who fall outside the norm often are not considered for positions; they are unable to secure adequate support for cultural, social, or family circumstances; and there is a lack of effective, proactive employment equity programs to bring about substantive change. Notwithstanding considerable efforts and achievements of recent years, it takes a very long time to change the system and to mobilize the leadership, the resources, and the buy-in from the entire university community that will make sustainable change possible.

But the issues are not all about a system that lies above or beyond the reach of ordinary academic citizens. Read the rest of this entry »

08 March 2010

International Women’s Day 2010: Remembering Four Trailblazing Haitian Feminists

Malinda Smith, Vice-President, Equity

In Haitian Creole there is a proverb that says, “Men anpil, chay pa lau,” which roughly translates as “many hands lighten the load.”  This proverb aptly captures the transnational story of women’s struggles for equity and social justice. It also symbolizes the inclusive approach of four trailblazing Haitian feminists – Myriam Merlet, Myrna Narcisse Theodore, Magalie Marcelin and Anne Marie Coriolan – who all lost their lives in last month’s catastrophic earthquake. These Haitian women, like many others, were fanm poto mitan:  pillars of society. It seems fitting that on this 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day (IWD),  we remember them and the ongoing struggles for justice, equity and social wellbeing that this day represents and celebrates.

History of IWD

While many people likely associate March 8 with the UN’s 1970s declaration, the day first emerged out of solidarity struggles with working class women.  A call for a National Women’s Day followed the 1908 New York garment workers strike, and a year later German social democrat Clara Zetkin called for an IWD at the International Conference for Working Women in Copenhagen.

Four countries – Austria, Denmark, Germany and Switzerland – observed IWD in 1910. Alexandra Kollontai, a Russian feminist, novelist and the world’s first female diplomat who helped to organize the day’s activities, characterized the massive turnout as “one seething trembling sea of women.” Participating in IWD events, women and men demanded women’s right to vote and hold public office, the right to work beyond “pink collar” jobs, an end to workplace discrimination, and greater access to education and vocational training.

Experiences of many of New York’s working class immigrant women resulted in a call for better labour legislation and energized the “Bread and Roses” campaign.  Over the next years, IWD activities dovetailed with the peace movement. Decades later, the UN heeded the demands of the women’s movement and proclaimed 1975 the International Women’s Year, officially adopting a resolution in 1977 that made the March 8 the UN Day for Women’s Rights and International Peace.

Pillars of society

Women’s rights, peace and social justice are precisely what Merlet, Narcisse, Marcelin and Coriolan advocated for in their beloved Haiti. Their deaths, along with 200,000 Haitians, sadly confirm what we already know: because of debilitating poverty, women and girls are particularly vulnerable to natural and human-made disasters. These Haitian feminists were fanm poto mitan.

Read the rest of this entry »

05 March 2010

Status of Women in Canada on International Women’s Day 2010

Judy Rebick, Ryerson University
Guest Contributor

It is International Women’s Day 2010, forty years after the Report of the Royal Commission on the Status of Women.  A generation has passed, my generation.  In some ways, there has been a revolution in the status of women since that time.  When I went to McGill University, just before the hearings of the Royal Commission,  only 30 percent of the undergraduates were women and almost no professors or graduate students.  In four years of study at McGill, I never read a book written by a woman nor had a female professor. Abortion and   information about birth control were illegal. Women were paid less than men for doing exactly the same job. There was only one woman in Parliament.

The Royal Commission broke new ground in women’s rights and human rights on a global level.  It recommended legalizing abortion, establishing a national child care programme, equal pay, and of course an increase the number of women in Parliament and in leadership positions in corporations and civil society.   The burgeoning women’s movement took up the struggle and in the next decades won legal equality for women in the Charter, legal abortion, pay equity, employment equity, rights for Indian women, a stronger rape law, and established a network of women’s services across the country including rape crisis centres and women’s shelters.

And, perhaps most importantly, it helped to liberate women’s consciousness so that today young women believe that they can do anything and most men believe in gender equality, even if they don’t always practice it.  With the exception of a national childcare programme,  we achieved and surpassed the recommendations of the Royal Commission.

So why have we stalled and in the last few years started to move backwards?  Read the rest of this entry »

04 March 2010

Gender gap and beyond: Are women the key to a Conservative majority?

Elisabeth Gidengil, McGill University
Guest Contributor

The term “gender gap” became a staple of political commentary following the 1980 United States presidential election. In that election, women were much less likely than men to vote for Ronald Reagan. The term is now used to refer to any differences in the political preferences and political behaviour of women and men. Gender gaps are one reason why the Conservatives have still not been able to break out of minority territory. In the 2008 federal election, women were less likely than men to vote Conservative and the five-point difference could well have been enough to deny them a majority.

This sex difference in support for the party of the right isn’t something new. Men were much more likely than women to vote for the new Reform party in the 1993 election: outside Quebec, the gender gap in Reform voting was 11 points. The Reform vote edged up in the 1997 election among both women and men, but the gender gap held remarkably steady at 11 points. And so it remained even when Reform re-made itself as the Canadian Alliance. Lack of appeal to women was a major factor preventing an Alliance breakthrough in the 2000 election, paving the way for the merger of the Alliance and the Progressive Conservatives to form the new Conservative Party.

Underpinning these sex differences in vote choice are differences in values and attitudes. Read the rest of this entry »

03 March 2010

Canadian scholars in solidarity with Chile

Malinda S. Smith, vice-president (Equity)
CFHSS

Perhaps the epic poem, La Araucana, said it best:  “Chile, province fertile and marked / in the famed region of Antarctica / by remote nations respected / for its strength, nobility, and power.”

Chile is a land known for its Nobel Prize-winning poets Gabriela Mistral (Lucila Godoy Alayago) and Pablo Neruda, world-renowned novelists including Francisco Núñez de Pineda y Bascuñán, Ariel Dorfman, Isabel Allende and Luis Sepúlveda, painters such as Nemesio Antunez and Roberto Matta, and musicians that include the likes of Inti-Illumani and Quilapayún. We also know it for its resilience, after surviving decades of dictatorship and disappearances.

On 27 February 2010, Chile became known for something else: it experienced a devastating 8.8 magnitude earthquake, which lasted three minutes, altered the earth by three inches and shortened the day by milliseconds. Tremors were felt as far as São Paulo, Brazil and Ica in southern Peru, and deaths recorded as far as Salta, Argentina. A tsunami watch initially was issued for over 53 countries and seiches (standing waves) occurred in New Orleans. The damage is still being assessed.

A Call to Action

Chile’s President Michelle Bachelet characterized the quake as a “catastrophe” and declared a national state of emergency. The quake has claimed some 800 lives, with many still missing, 500,000 homes damaged or destroyed, 1.5 million people displaced and impacts felt by over 2 million of Chile’s 17 million people. Read the rest of this entry »

02 March 2010

Unreasonably focusing on reasonable accommodation in Canada?

Jean-François Gaudreault-DesBiens, Université de Montréal
Guest Contributor

Here we go again.  As I write this entry, a new controversy has erupted following a Quebec government’s decision to allow private Chassidic schools to hold classes on weekends and even during the summer.  The idea underlying this decision is to permit these schools to teach both their religion-heavy curriculum, which they already do, and the compulsory subjects prescribed by the department of education (French, history, maths, etc.), which they are barely doing currently, thereby potentially contravening provincial law.

The government sees these weekend and summer classes as a way to facilitate the social integration of Chassidic children by ensuring that they, like all other Quebec children, are exposed to some core subjects deemed critically important for their education.  Since this decision was made public, however, proponents of a strong conception of secularism have vigorously attacked it. In essence, they argue that it represents an unacceptable and unreasonable bending of a general rule, i.e. to follow the regular academic calendar, in view of facilitating the life of religious groups already acting in breach of the law.  Unions have jumped in the debate, arguing that the government’s decision will likely provoke a slippery slope of similar claims and, therefore, a patchwork of different, religiously-inspired, academic calendars.

The problem with these critiques is that they lose sight of the fundamental objectives that are sought when we accommodate religious individuals.   From a strictly legal perspective, this doctrine seeks, of course, to ensure respect for freedom of religion and religious equality.  Read the rest of this entry »

25 February 2010

Après la fièvre olympique, au tour du budget fédéral

Pierre Normand, CFHSS
Director of Communications

Photo courtesy RobMan170 on Flickr.

Alors que les Canadiens continuent d’être captivés par le drame personnel de la patineuse Joannie Rochette et regagnent espoir de décrocher une première médaille d’or en hockey masculin, on commence à en apprendre un peu plus sur les plans du gouvernement quant au prochain budget fédéral.

Les signaux envoyés aux médias il y a quelques jours pointaient vers un budget poursuivant les efforts de relance économique amorcés avec le budget 2009 mais surtout vers un budget sans nouvelles dépenses.   Or, voilà que ce matin on a adoucit le ton en laissant entendre qu’il pourrait y avoir dans le prochain budget Flaherty des investissements  «sans extravagance».

Ces mesures modestes porteront-elles sur la recherche et le financement des conseils subventionnaires?  On peut toujours l’espérer d’autant plus que la stratégie de la Fédération au cours des derniers mois a été de recommander au gouvernement des investissements modestes mais stratégiques dans la capacité de recherche et d’innovation du Canada.

Dans une lettre au ministre des Finances envoyée la semaine dernière, l a Fédération réitérait ses recommandations pour le prochain budget fédéral.  L’envoi de notre lettre coincidait d’ailleurs avec les efforts de dernière minute d’autres groupes d’intérêt pour tenter de convaincre le ministre d’appuyer leur cause.

Le 4 mars prochain, la Fédération prendra part à la session à huis clos au cours de laquelle nous pourrons prendre connaissance des documents du budget et préparer notre réponse initiale.  Celle-ci sera présentée aux membres de la Fédération lors d’une téléconférence qui se tiendra quelques minutes après la fin de la lecture du budget.  Le lendemain matin, la Fédération rendra publique sa réponse accompagnée d’un survol des aspects du budget qui touchent la recherche et les conseils subventionnaires.

Ce sera intéressant de voir comment les médias traiteront le budget dans le contexte post-olympique et possiblement avec quelques nouvelles médailles canadiennes à célébrer.  Si seulement les médias accordaient autant de couverture à l’excellence en recherche.

25 February 2010

Why gender still matters in politics

Brenda O’Neill, University of Calgary
Guest Contributor

It’s safe to say that the issue of ‘women in politics’ no longer generates the attention that it once did. The 1984 leaders’ debate between John Turner (Liberal), Brian Mulroney (Progressive Conservative) and Ed Broadbent (New Democratic Party) on such issues as pay equity, affirmative action, abortion and child care seems unlikely to be repeated in the near future. Women’s issues simply do not generate this level of attention. An exception can be the appearance of women running for high political office – Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin most recently – but even this is no guarantee that coverage of their campaigns will focus on substance over style.

But lack of attention to these issues doesn’t mean that they are irrelevant. These issues are important because gender remains an important element for understanding contemporary politics. It matters because despite the narrowing of many differences between women and men, for example in their educational, income and occupational statuses, gaps remain. And women and men continue to exhibit behavioural and attitudinal political differences that defy simple explanation.

When I’ve examined gender gaps in voting, for example, I’ve found evidence that women and men do not often make the same choices, with gender gaps varying over time and across countries. Read the rest of this entry »

25 February 2010

e-Dialogue on the future of the social sciences

Ryan Saxby Hill, CFHSS
Media Relations

Noreen Golfman, president of the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, joined a rock star lineup of speakers for an e-dialogue hosted by Royal Roads University this month. The discussion is now available online here.

Noreen offered her take on the value of the social sciences and provided examples of where innovation and creativity can be found in our community. There was also a heated discussion on what AVATAR can tell us about the Social Sciences -  information you might be able to use at your Oscar party next month.

23 February 2010

The new Canadian citizenship test: No ‘barbarians’ need apply

Radha Jhappan, Carleton University
Guest Contributor

Photo courtesy Chealion on Flickr.

The Conservative government of Canada recently issued a new guide to citizenship entitled “Discover Canada: The Rights and Responsibilities of Citizenship.” The guide projects a particular view of Canada past and present through some arguably selected ‘facts’ about which immigrants are to be tested in order to achieve citizenship status.

The early Conservatives of the Reform Party scorned official bilingualism and multiculturalism. Its 1991 Blue Sheet stated that the party opposed “any immigration based on race or creed or designed to radically or suddenly alter the ethnic makeup of Canada.” Although this was dropped, the goal of the current Conservative Party’s immigration policy is to “focus on immigrants who best fit into the ‘Canadian fabric.’” There is clearly a hierarchy of the sorts of people who can stitch themselves into the national fabric and those who can’t.  Would the latter, one wonders, be people of certain ‘races or creeds’ who might “alter the ethnic makeup of Canada,” while the former are people who have ethnic origins in Europe?

In some respects the guide is an improvement over its predecessor. Read the rest of this entry »