The status of women at Canadian universities and the role of faculty unions.
| Author | Varpalotai, Aniko |
Introduction
Women undergraduates now comprise more than 50% of students at Canadian universities; women academics, however, have yet to achieve employment and pay equity. Between 1987 and 2007 the proportion of full-time women university teachers holding tenured positions had more than doubled to 30%. However, only 20% of Full Professors teaching in Canadian universities are women (CAUT Almanac, 2009-2010; UWOFA, 2006). Currently, 41 universities in Canada have unionized faculty associations; and approximately 18 Faculty Associations have Status of Women and/or Equity committees (Rumelski, 2010). In addition to women who constitute the largest equity seeking group within Canadian universities, the other politically 'designated' equity groups: visible minorities, Aboriginal Canadians and persons with disabilities continue to be significantly under-represented within the Canadian academy. "Despite some notable progress in the past decade towards greater diversity, the Canadian academy remains largely white and male." (CAUT, 2010) Various attempts have been made at local, provincial and national levels to improve the representation and inclusion of these 'minorities' throughout the university hierarchy; change has, however, been predictably slow. This article will examine the role and contributions of faculty unions, and status of women committees, in helping women to achieve more equitable status within the Canadian academy.
Part I: Slow But Steady....
Many volumes have been dedicated over the years to the status of women--and the place of feminists--within the academy. Some of the North American contributions to this discussion, from various disciplinary and experiential perspectives, include: Academic Women (Bernard, 1964), Coming of Age in Academe: Rekindling Women's hopes and reforming the Academy, (Martin, 2000), Breaking Anonymity: The Chilly Climate for Women Faculty, (The Chilly Collective, 1995), and York Stories: Women in Higher Education, (The York Stories Collective, 2000). Other collections such as: Teachers, Gender & Careers, (Acker, 1989) and Challenging Times: The Women's Movement in Canada and the United States (Backhouse and Flaherty, 1992) include chapters on women in higher education. Related to this discussion there have also been books on employment equity in Canada (Agocs and Burr, 1992) and the evolution of women's studies programs in Canadian universities (Braithwaite, Heald, Luhmann and Rosenberg, 2004). While there is some literature on women and the Canadian union movement (White, 1993; Yates, 2006), there is relatively little written on women and equity in relation to faculty unions.
Statistics over the years show slow but steady progress as women make their way into and within Canadian universities. In 2007, the proportion of full-time women faculty grew to 34% (from 28% in 2001). This category includes tenure-track, tenured and limited term (contract) full-time faculty. The growth in women Full Professors in Canada has seen an increase from 15% in 2001 to just over 20% at the time of writing. Despite a series of pay equity studies and adjustments by 2007 the gender salary gap was still 88% across all ranks (UWO, 2009). At the same time there has been a continuing growth in the female student population with 58% at the Bachelor's level; 54% pursuing a Master's degree and 46% engaged in studies at the PhD level. Internationally, in countries sharing comparable university systems the proportion of male/female faculty is remarkably similar.
In addition to overall representation, Canadian female faculty members are disproportionately distributed across major disciplines: Education = 49.9%; Fine Arts = 42.2%; Humanities = 41.3%; Health Professions = 39.5%; Social Sciences = 34.9%; Mathematics & Physical Sciences = 15.2%; Engineering & Applied Sciences = 12 % (CAUT Education Review, 2010, p.2). The distribution of women in the teaching ranks across disciplines declines predictably from the traditionally female dominated areas of Education, the Fine Arts and the Humanities, reaching something close to parity within the Health Professions (though even here there are disparities when comparing Nursing with Medicine, for example), and then declining precipitously in the Maths, Physical Sciences and Engineering. Among the issues that have galvanized Canadian women academics in recent years has been the under-representation of women among those awarded the prestigious Canada Research Chairs in 2000 (Kondro, 2002), and more recently, the entirely male field awarded the even richer 19 Canada Excellence Research Chair appointments (Industry Canada, 2010).
Among the administrative ranks, while the number of women in senior administrative positions at Canadian universities has increased since the first survey measuring this level of female participation was undertaken in 2000, women's share of those positions remains about the same for the past decade at just under 30 percent. The positions surveyed included: president, vice-president, associate and assistant vice-president, dean, assistant or associate dean, chair, director (or their equivalents at each level) and 'other'. (Berkowitz, 2005)
Despite longstanding employment equity policies and practices mandated by federal legislation (Agocs and Burr, 1992), the challenge of reducing these inequities remains. Women are still seriously under-represented among tenured professors and within certain disciplines. Women and visible minorities experience an earnings gap and experience higher unemployment rates than their white male colleagues. Aboriginal peoples continue to be the most underrepresented equity seeking group among the ranks of Canada's university professors. (CAUT, 2010, p. 5)
The following persistent barriers to employment equity have been identified in various studies and reports on gender inequities in Canadian universities: overt and systemic discrimination; hiring practices and pay structures; career interruptions (pregnancy/maternity); end of mandatory retirement (aging academic workforce vs. renewal of faculty complement); retention (chilly climate/ harassment/spousal hiring); student enrolment by discipline; marginalization of female faculty teaching feminist curriculum; and other issues including mentoring, performance evaluations, slow promotion, and work/life balance.(Baker, 2009)
Historical Context
2010 is a year of anniversaries for landmark events for women in Canada. It is the 100th anniversary of International Women's Day:
International Women's Day was proclaimed at the meeting of the Second International of socialist parties in Copenhagen in 1910, following on years of campaigning by women in the labour and socialist movements for equality. It grew in prominence across the 20th century, and eventually in 1977 the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution stating that this day "recognized the role of women in peace efforts and development and urged an end to discrimination and an increase of support for women's full and equal participation." (Socialist Project, 2010, p.1) This year, also marks the 40th anniversary of the landmark Report of the Royal Commission on The Status of Women in Canada (1970). The largest section, chapter 3, of this report was dedicated to education at all levels. While acknowledging the complexity of education "in a country as vast and diverse as Canada" (p. 161-162) the report describes the status of girls' and women's education as central to the overall status of women in relation to all other indicators. According to the statistics available to the Commission for university enrolment patterns, "women comprised a slowly increasing percentage of the total enrolment in undergraduate programmes, from 16.3 per cent in 1921 to 34.2 per cent in 1967-68." (p.167) In terms of graduate programs: "women earn about 20 per cent of the master's degrees and about eight per cent of the doctorates." (p. 169). There are scattered mentions of the status of women university teachers, with reference to a study submitted by the Canadian Association of University Teachers. Among the findings was pay discrepancy : the average salary was $10,690 for a male professor, while the women earned on average $8,428, a $2,262 difference. "It was found that slightly more than half this difference could not be explained by any or all of the factors of age, degree held, field of specialization, university, region or academic rank." (p. 75) The study also found that women with the same amount of training and at the same age were much less likely to hold an administrative position than their male equivalents, and while one out of every four men was a Full Professor, only one out of 21 women had achieved that rank. (p. 93). "There were more than 30 times as many men deans as women deans (excluding deans of Nursing Education and Home Economics)." (Ibid) Reflecting on the Royal Commission twenty years later, Monique Begin (Executive Secretary to the Commission) had this to say:
There have been enormous changes in our collective sensitivity to women's issues since the tabling of the Report of the Royal Commission on the Status of Women in Canada (RCSW) in the House of Commons on 7 December, 1970.... Among its many contributions to changing our society, feminism is now firmly engaged in reinterpreting and re-evaluating knowledge within almost all of the disciplines of the academy. There is however, much work still to be done in making scholarship and knowledge accessible and representative of women.. There is no doubt in my mind that the federal government has now deliberately backtracked on the issues of serious concern in the daily lives of women.... grants and programs have been cut or cancelled, ensuring women's associations have been seriously affected in their work, if not in their very existence, and the "status of women" is now the pariah of both the bureaucrats and the politicians. (Begin, 1992, in...
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