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 »

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 »

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 »

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 »

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 »