No girls allowed: Canada’s poached professors all have penises
After scouring the globe for some of the world’s smartest academics, the Canadian Excellence in Research Chair program has found 19 people whom it is paying tens of millions of dollars to come to Canada. Only one problem: the feds recruited a bunch of dudes. Even Industry Minister Tony Clement was critical of the sausage fest. “It really stands out,” he told the Star after the researchers were announced to much fanfare. “I said, ‘Where are the women?’”
“I felt kicked in the stomach,” says Wendy Robbins, co-ordinator of women’s studies at the University of New Brunswick and one of a group of academics who mounted a successful human-rights challenge to the gender imbalance in a previous federal research-chair program…. On this issue, though, the Conservative minister in charge is sympathetic.
The excuse/reason from the woman who runs the program, Suzanne Fortier, is that, at the moment, the women in fields the government was looking to fund are still early in their careers. “They are there. They are coming,” says Fortier. “In 10 years, watch out.”
Just what the Conservatives need: another problem with women voters, and this one means that a decade hence, an army of irate, disenfranchised lady super-geniuses is coming after them.
• Feds grant big dollars to all-male research group [Toronto Star]
• Female academics ‘discouraged’ after women shut out of funding [Montreal Gazette]
• How Canada poached academic stars from around the globe [Globe and Mail]
![](http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=https://torontolife.com/city/no-girls-allowed-canadas-poached-professors-all-have-penises/&title=No girls allowed: Canada’s poached professors all have penises&picture=https://torontolife.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/Sausagefest.jpg&description=[caption id="attachment_27101" align="alignleft" width="320" caption="Cocks of the walk: international researchers are welcomed in Ottawa (Image: Jenny Cestnik)"][/caption]
After scouring the globe for some of the world’s smartest academics, the Canadian Excellence in Research Chair program has found 19 people whom it is paying tens of millions of dollars to come to Canada. Only one problem: the feds recruited a bunch of dudes. Even Industry Minister Tony Clement was critical of the sausage fest. “It really stands out,” he told the Star after the researchers were announced to much fanfare. “I said, ‘Where are the women?’”
“I felt kicked in the stomach,” says Wendy Robbins, co-ordinator of women’s studies at the University of New Brunswick and one of a group of academics who mounted a successful human-rights challenge to the gender imbalance in a previous federal research-chair program…. On this issue, though, the Conservative minister in charge is sympathetic.
The excuse/reason from the woman who runs the program, Suzanne Fortier, is that, at the moment, the women in fields the government was looking to fund are still early in their careers. “They are there. They are coming,” says Fortier. “In 10 years, watch out.”
Just what the Conservatives need: another problem with women voters, and this one means that a decade hence, an army of irate, disenfranchised lady super-geniuses is coming after them.
• Feds grant big dollars to all-male research group [Toronto Star]
• Female academics 'discouraged' after women shut out of funding [Montreal Gazette]
• How Canada poached academic stars from around the globe [Globe and Mail]){kind=link}
I as a female don’t have a problem with this. As a female, I have first hand knowledge that yes, sometimes fields can be saturated with men; however, that is often because in the last twenty years womens lib. has back-slided giving men the upper hand once again. We (women) should see this as a battle cry that their aren’t enough of us out there working hard enough to put up a show, and those that are there aren’t fighting hard enough to fight for what we deserve. I believe that its not this groups fault for hiring men, its ours for not working hard enough to kick down the door.
All of the 36 finalists were men. That translates into about 6-8 missing women, if one looks at the representation of women in science & engineering around the world in the countries which lead in these areas. The end result is that one missed out on some higher quality women for some lesser quality men. Some of these 19 men had zero chance of ever getting jobs at places at MIT or Harvard, while all the star senior women scientists and engineers at places like MIT and Harvard were absent from the 36 finalists.
In the end, Canada loses, because inadvertently the criteria of holding a penis took priority over the criteria of being the very best in his or her own field. And it is disappointing that people like Clement and Fortier don’t even realize this, with all their silly talk of how can we get more women without compromising merit. They are too ignorant to realize that getting 36 male finalists and zero female finalists told them they had already compromised on merit.
Women like Fortier are just as capable of inadvertent discrimination as men like Clement – and her comments, which completely ignore the senior female stars MIT and Harvard have recruited, reveal this.