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Attracting and keeping women and visible minorities in Canadian geography departments. (Focus: equity for women in geography).

Article Excerpt
My remarks in this piece are based on two studies on equity issues. First, a study of Canadian geography departments published in 1996 (Rose et al. 1996) and, second, a survey of recruitment and retention of faculty and senior-level administrators in four British Columbian universities (Laurier Institution 2000). The objective of this paper is to explore why women and visible minorities are still underrepresented in the faculties of Canadian geography departments, particularly at the higher ranks.

The CAG Equity Report

Though the results of the Canadian Association of Geographers (CAG) Equity Report (1) are now six years old, a number of summary remarks about the findings related to faculty and graduate students need to be readdressed so that we can begin to bench mark where the discipline finds itself in 2002. I divide my remarks into those concerning faculty and those concerning graduate students in the discipline.

Geography Faculty

The findings of the CAG Equity Report show that, at the time of the survey (1994-95), the representation of women overall on the faculties of Canadian geography departments was vastly improved compared to the late 1980s. However, there were still six departments that had no women on their teaching faculty and seven that had only one. The report made recommendations to redress this situation (Rose 2000).

Secondly, the report made it clear that women are underrepresented as faculty given the increase in the number of female PhD graduates in geography. In other words, women graduates are finding opportunities elsewhere (`pull factors') but may also be systematically excluded from hiring due to a number of possible `push' factors such as restrictive job descriptions, being viewed as unproductive or unaccomplished (even when it is untrue), cronyism and so on. Winkler (2000) reports similar findings for women academics in the USA in general and in geography in particular.

Finally, "it is clear that there are still very few aboriginal persons and members of visible minorities in our discipline" (Rose et al. 1996, 10). Kobayashi (this issue) confirms that the situation has not improved much since 1994-95, if at all. The same can be said for the presence of people with disabilities. The graduate student body, at the time of the survey, was also overwhelmingly white and able-bodied. (2)

Graduate Student Issues

Regarding the presence of women in graduate programs in geography, the situation has vastly improved in the past fifteen to twenty years. Though the number of women graduate students in Canadian geography has increased tremendously, graduates are not necessarily being proactively recruited into academia despite the commitment of many universities to the principles of employment equity. (3)

In the mid-nineties, women made up a significant segment of the Canadian geography graduate student population where they formed half of all Master's degree students and approximately...