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A generation later, and still two percent: changing the culture of Canadian geography. (Focus: equity for women in geography).

Article Excerpt
When I was a PhD student more than two decades ago, more than half of about 50 doctoral students in my programme were women, and I was one of but two non-white students. At the time, I did not think that I would face issues of equity in my anticipated academic career. Recently, however, I went through the list of those who graduated when I did, to find that over the years most of the men have become full professors or department heads, but most of the women are no longer practicing as academic geographers. (1) Today in my own department, I am one of three women among nineteen tenured or tenure-track faculty, and I am the only visible minority. (2)

What happened? More than a full generation after I completed graduate school with such a strong sense of disciplinary equity, we have made precious little progress. Just how little is shown in Lawrence Berg's Table 4 (this issue, 250) which shows that just 2.4 percent of women faculty in geography are full professors. I have also done a very rough survey of the Canadian Association of Geographers Directory. While the figures available there are approximate, they confirm that a gradual increase in the proportion of women is evident in the higher proportion of assistant professors (supported by Berg's Table 4). These figures also indicate, however, that in recent years geography departments have appointed nearly two men for every woman. And the appointment of visible minorities has actually declined in recent years.

The most recently available Canadian Census figures indicate an overall Canadian labour market availability rate of 10.3 percent for visible minorities. (3) Yet 18.7 percent of all Canadians holding PhDs are visible minorities, and they make up 10.3 percent of fulltime university faculty. (4) The figures for the discipline of geography, however, are much lower. While precise figures are not available, my survey of the data available from the Canadian Association of Geographers indicates that between 6 and 7 percent of male faculty and between 1 and 2 percent of female faculty are visible minorities. S Furthermore, geographers are less and less representative of their students, who have always been gender balanced, and who are increasingly visible minorities, especially in the largest cities where most of the geography departments are located. Moreover, visible minority communities are growing more quickly than the Canadian population as a whole, and becoming increasingly concentrated in those large cities, at the same time that...