YUFA
External
by Robert MacDermid, Communications Officer
"Discouragement" and "outrage" were the words included in a motion passed by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council deploring the small percentage of women awarded Canada Research Chairs (CRC).
The CRC Program, established in 2000 by the Federal Government, provided $900 million to support the establishment of 2,000 Chairs by 2005. With 627 of the chairs allocated Canada-wide, only 92, less than 15%, have gone to women scholars. York has done only slightly better with just 3 women (19%) amongst the 16 Tier 1 and 2 CRC holders.
Responsibility for the under-representation of female scholars had been laid by CRC administrators at the feet of the universities. They nominate candidates after an internal selection process, and about 90% of these are awarded chairs after assessment by the College of Reviewers. CRC program coordinators and the three research councils have been saying that university selection processes are at fault and that higher level decision-making bodies have no choice but to appoint candidates produced by those procedures.
Some of the gender imbalance might be explained by the low percentages of women scholars in a number of the science disciplines and amongst the older cohort of scholars. In fact, female chairs did make up only 10% of Tier 1 senior chairs nationally, but they also won just 21% of the junior Tier 2 positions. Members who consult the list of chair-holders nation-wide may very well not find the names of very prominent female scholars in a number of disciplines.
Why only 3 women at York?
York's process for selecting CRC nominees was discussed through the Joint Committee for the Administration of the Agreement (JCOAA) in 2000 and 2001. YUFA representatives pointed out that the final stage of selection of nominees should be where affirmative action procedures are applied. The administration did not share this view. YUFA eventually had to sign a protocol with an advisory to units that "in so far as it is practicable", they should "endeavour to follow the principles embodied in the affirmative action clauses" of the Collective Agreement in recommending CRCs.
Hiring units that decided to nominate a candidate for the internal selection process were therefore required to apply affirmative action principles at the department level. But these procedures were conceived for an application process with several candidates and not for a process where just one or two candidates are considered.
York's CRC nominees "are determined by the President, on the advice of the University CRC Selection Committee. The criteria for selection are the excellence of the candidate and the candidate's fit with the CRC institutional strategic research plan." The CRC Selection Committee has 4 senior administrators, the Affirmative Action Director and the chairs two Senate committees, SCOR and APPC. Since this committee has not chosen to apply affirmative action criteria at the university wide level, it is up to units to nominate female academics to close the gender gap. Members should be raising this issue the next time units discuss a potential CRC candidate. There are many female academics that deserve to be nominated.
Background on the CRC program
The CRC program was first announced in the context of the brain-drain debate that suggested that academics and other professionals were fleeing Canada. While there was a lot of heated discussion on this point, the evidence was inconclusive at best. The early discussion of the CRC program talked about bringing Canadian scholars home from abroad. That now seems to have been largely forgotten, perhaps because even the large salaries given Chairs were not competitive with the best American universities. Most of York's Chairs were already at York and the program appears to have become a way of keeping or rewarding nominated scholars.
In absolute numbers, York appears to have done relatively well in winning chairs in relation to other Ontario universities, especially considering the university's small Science faculty and the lack of engineering and medical schools.
| Canada Research Chairs (CRCs) awarded to Ontario Universities, Tiers 1 & 2 | |||||
| Brock | 2 | Trent | 5 | ||
| Carleton | 9 | Guelph | 11 | ||
| Lakehead | 4 | Ottawa | 18 | ||
| McMaster | 33 | Waterloo | 13 | ||
| Queen's | 15 | Wildfrid Laurier | 2 | ||
| Ryerson | 2 | Windsor | 6 | ||
| Western | 21 | York | 16 | ||