All Posts Tagged With: "equality"
The presidential glass ceiling
More women than ever have university degrees, but men still dominate university leadership
When Elizabeth Cannon showed up for her first day of engineering school in 1979, women made up five per cent of the program. Now, as she takes the reins of the University of Calgary, women make up 23 per cent of the school’s future engineers and more than half of the university’s student population, a trend reflected in schools across Canada.
But as Canadians fret over the feminization of lecture halls and ponder affirmative action for males, they seem to have missed the fact that the number of women sitting in the president’s chairs remains stubbornly low. In the fall of 2000, 12 of the 68 leaders of Canadian universities—18 per cent—were female. A decade later, just 13 of 70—19 per cent—are women. The U.S. saw a similar rise and plateau: in 1986, women made up nine per cent of university and college heads; the number grew to 19 per cent in 1998 before growth stalled again, settling at just 23 per cent today. Female professors are being hired in almost equal numbers to men—45 per cent of new full-time teaching positions were awarded to women in 2008—but the upper ranks are still overwhelmingly male. Just 22 per cent of full-time professors are women, although they make up a majority of education departments and nearly half of arts teachers.
Related: Knocking on the glass ceiling
We asked some female university leaders why the growth in female leadership has slowed to almost nothing—and what can be done to fix it. “The fact that we’re getting more women in the academic ranks will increase the number of women at the top,” says Cannon. “But we can’t rely on demographics alone.”
Martha Piper, who oversaw UBC from 1997 to 2006, was surprised to learn that more women aren’t leading our universities: “Wow. My impression was that more women were being appointed than that,” she says. Piper says if women are going to win the top spots, administrations have to actively encourage them. That means identifying women inside the university during succession planning, encouraging them, and hiring from that pool. “Every time there’s a new president, there are these national search teams,” she explains, “I sit on a couple of corporate boards and they make it their job to figure out who the leaders are and how to develop them. Universities need to start cultivating from within.”
Ramona Lumpkin, who started her term as president of Mount Saint Vincent University this fall, encountered one roadblock in her 33-year career that she suspects is holding other women back. It took her awhile to realize that her less assertive and more collaborative leadership style was equal (if different) to the leadership style of her male colleagues. “Not everyone speaks in the bass range,” she says, referring to her soft voice that can get lost in a room full of men. Lumpkin says it will take some recognition on the part of administrations that women often lead differently, in order for them to feel comfortable leading male-heavy groups.
Piper says being a mother kept her from moving up sooner. She was encouraged to apply for a vice-president’s position at the University of Alberta around 1990, but she decided to focus on parenting instead, and wonders how many women give up on advancement entirely, due to family pressures. “Probably 80-plus per cent of women decide somewhere mid-career whether they want to throw their hat in the ring to be a head, a dean, or whatever,” says Piper. “You have to ask what they need at that stage of life.”
Sandra Acker, a sociologist with the University of Toronto (who was an associate dean once herself) studies how women succeed and fail in academic administration. In her recent paper, “Gendered games in academic leadership,” Acker profiled four female academic administrators chosen from 31 interviewees. While she notes that not every academic is a mother, she wrote, “the most striking similarity is the way that all four women talked about family and relationship issues affecting their choices.” Indeed, one of the women she studied said it was impossible to live up to the expectations of being both a manager and a mother when her boss was working 85-hour weeks. “I work a lot, but didn’t want to be there on a Friday night at nine o’clock. I have a family,” she told Acker. The man’s family was in another city, allowing him to work late nights and weekends.
Piper believes that universities should recognize that mothers are often the ones driving kids to music lessons and helping with their homework. “We look so much at maternity leave, which is important, but early teenagehood is just as demanding and we don’t have good supports at that period of time,” she explains. Some female academics may need after-school programs for their children, especially considering that highly mobile academics rarely have extended family members living nearby who can babysit, she says.
As Elizabeth Cannon decides how to shape her school’s future, she’s already thought about how to nurture women along the way. “We’ve tried on campus to increase access to quality daycare, to give [mom] academics peace of mind. Being supportive of women who have returned from maternity leave matters too,” says Cannon. “But really, it’s not just tangible things you can do,” she says. “It’s also the culture that you build.”
Photo: Elizabeth Cannon runs the University of Calgary; Ramona Lumpkin (right) runs Mount Saint Vincent
Tempest in a Niqab
What Naema Ahmed’s expulsion from a French class really shows
In August 2009, Naema Ahmed, a pharmacist, mother of three and an observant Muslim living in Montreal, began what is known in French as a cour de francisation—literally, a Frenchifying class—at CEGEP Saint-Laurent in the city’s north end. Apart from being taught the (often confounding) rules of French conjugation, students taking the 33-week, 1,000-hour class learn rhythm, intonation and the practical use of the language: how to shop for groceries and clothes, as well as how to ask for help if they get lost or confused. They also learn the basic workings of Quebec society: that it is French-speaking, secular and considers men and women as equals. In other words, the class teaches integration nearly as much as it does the French language.
At the behest of a school official, Ahmed lifted her niqab—a garment worn by certain observant Muslim women that covers the whole face except the eyes—when registering for the course. When she showed up for class, however, Ahmed refused to remove her veil in the presence of the three male students in attendance in the class of 19. The following 11 weeks, according to a government source, “were one step forward, two steps back”; the teacher often had to halt oral exercises between students to accommodate Ahmed—she didn’t want to speak unveiled to the men of the class. Moreover, the source said, Ahmed at first agreed to remove her niqab for certain exercises, then changed her mind as the classes wore on. “There was no will on her part to compromise,” said the source. (Ahmed was contacted by Maclean’s for this story, but she declined an interview.)
Midway through the second 11-week block of classes, the teacher had had enough. She went to the director of the school, Paul-Émile Bourque. School officials further attempted to have Ahmed remove the veil, which failed; Bourque then called the province’s Immigration Ministry, which runs the classes. (The $4,000-program is entirely subsidized by the Quebec government.) With the consent of Yolande James, Quebec’s minister of immigration, Ahmed was asked to leave the class. It was likely the first time in the program’s 40-year history that a student was turned away on account of a few square centimetres of black cloth.
Ahmed has now become the centrepiece of the ensuing media storm; another school asked her to leave when her name hit the headlines across the country, after she refused yet again to remove her niqab. She has since filed a complaint with Quebec’s human rights tribunal. It is the latest salvo in the continuing debate over so-called “reasonable accommodations,” pitting the Quebec model of integration against the religious convictions of a handful of recent arrivals—and, some say, the rest-of-Canada model that exists outside Quebec’s borders.
Welcoming—and fretting about—immigration has been something of a national pastime since well before the federal government enshrined multiculturalism as its official policy in 1971. From outrage at the spectre of pork-free cabanes à sucre in Quebec to a backlash against religious schools in Ontario and beyond, the country as a whole has experienced certain growing pains as it has come to depend on immigrants to buoy its flagging number of old-stock Canadians.
But what Ahmed’s case shows, more than any intolerance in Quebec, may be how the country remains divided along linguistic lines. “It was a decision that needed to be made,” James told Maclean’s recently, of her decision to become personally involved in the case. “We have a responsibility to defend the individual rights and freedoms, but I also believe that one person’s rights must take into account the individual rights of others.” And the vast majority of Quebecers agreed with the government’s decision to ask Ahmed to leave.
But reaction outside Quebec was swift and righteously outraged. “Quebec…is proving to be unreasonable,” opined the Globe and Mail in an editorial, suggesting that the removal of Ahmed from the class was akin to “empowering state agents to enforce dress codes”—something usually reserved for “Arab and West Asian countries, such as the former Taliban regime.” “Quebec…is fast becoming the most hostile province in Canada for anyone of a minority culture or religion,” wrote Calgary Herald columnist Naomi Lakritz. “In Quebec they don’t like the burka,” wrote CBC business columnist and anchor Amanda Lang on her Twitter account. “[A]nd they’re funding in vitro with tax dollars…anyone see a pattern here?” (Lang, who didn’t respond to requests to elaborate, apparently confused the niqab with the burka, the far more constraining garment worn primarily in Afghanistan and Pakistan.)
This sentiment doesn’t necessarily stand up to the facts. In the past 10 years, Quebec has seen a 50 per cent increase in the number of permanent residents living within its borders. Yet, says Université de Montréal professor Marie McAndrew, the province is still seen as intolerant and backward. At the same time, many Quebecers believe the rest of Canada is a cabal of “ghettoized communities where no one speaks to each other.” A recent Environics poll suggests that while Canadians feel discrimination on the whole is on the wane, they make an exception when it comes to English-French relations: each group feels persecuted by the other in roughly the same measures as five years ago, when the poll was last conducted.
