Science and Research Committee on Oct. 4th, 2023

[Dr. Susan Prentice]

My employer is the University of Manitoba, so they're the ones that set my salary.

I'm lucky to have a union—we're professors who are unionized—so the union has a role in this too, in bargaining for equity.

I'll use my own career as an example. I was hired in 1993, so back in the early nineties I had part of that 2.84% I talked about. I've made two individual anomaly awards, which have both been successful. I still have pay inequity—but it's not statistically significant—compared to some of my male colleagues. This is clearly on my institution.

If these data are required to be reported, if they need to be made accessible and transparent, if they're presented in disaggregated ways, they provide the kind of evidence and fuel to allow actors on their own campuses to pick them up and to push their own institutions.

One thing I said, and I think it's true, is that to my knowledge, every time there has been a study that has looked at inequity in pay, it has been led by those who have been affected by it. It does not primarily start from the top. If Heather has been able to implement that at the University of Toronto, hats off to her. Almost always this is done by people who are seeking to end the unfairness, so that's where they start.

[Gord Johns, NDP, Courtenay—Alberni, BC]

Thank you.

In The Equity Myth: Racialization and Indigeneity at Canadian Universities, by Frances Henry et al., the authors write that generally speaking, more racialized faculty perceive that tenure and promotion are based on soft metrics rather than hard metrics, like publications or winning grants. The opposite pattern is largely found with perceptions about the administrative and committee appointments and hiring. Consistently across all measures of perceptions, fewer racialized faculty agree that equity considerations are a factor affecting tenure, promotion, administration and committee appointments, and hiring.

Beyond pay, how does inequity affect the experiences of faculty at Canadian universities, including tenure, promotion, appointments and hiring?

Maybe you can answer that as well, Ms. Prentice.

[Dr. Susan Prentice]

Thank you.

At my university, for example, my job says 40% of my time is teaching, 40% of my time is research and 20% of my time is service. I don't think it's always understood outside the academy that professors' jobs are very rich and complex.

For example, when it comes time for promotion to full professor at my university, a person's service dossier will not be taken into account. In my faculty, we only look at teaching and at publications. Even though 20% of faculty time is supposed to be spent on service—which means collegial self-government, curriculum committees, reviewing for journals, sitting on senate, sitting on boards of governors and the rest—this kind of work does not get factored in.

We know from a lot of evidence that minorities—originally women, but now increasingly indigenous colleagues and others—do a disproportionate amount of service work, and yet the institutional reward structure doesn't recognize this fairly. I think one of the things we need to do to recognize excellence—and this is to pick up Tina's point—is to recognize excellence in all the domains of faculty work.

The 40/40/20 that I gave you is a tenure-track colleague's workload. In a teaching stream, it might be 80/20 teaching/research. The point will be that this work is often disproportionately unfairly distributed, and these mechanisms to fully assess the workload aren't always very well done.

It's why at my university, for example, we can see that despite everything, a year and a half—18 months—separates promotion to full professor rates for women and men, and that at year 12, women are 15.5% less likely than men to be full professors, perhaps because the excellence in their comprehensive workload is not recognized in the way that it might be for other colleagues.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Corey Tochor]

Thank you so much.

We are now onto our five-minute round of questions, leading off with MP Lobb for five minutes.

[Ben Lobb, Conservative, Huron—Bruce, ON]

Thanks very much, Chair.

My first question is for Professor Prentice.

At the University of Manitoba, what's the HR department say to you when you present your complaints? When the professors say 40/40/20 is not fair, do they not say anything back to you? What's their point?

[Dr. Susan Prentice]

I've personally never had to deal with the HR department. Most of the time when we discuss our workload, we're dealing with the department head or a dean or perhaps a vice-provost.

The larger question I'm asking universities to address more carefully is to monitor workloads and to recognize that some colleagues do different kinds of work. My indigenous colleagues, for example, spend enormous amounts of time mentoring indigenous students at the University of Manitoba. This is absolutely critical to student success. If they spend more time in teaching and more time mentoring but they perhaps publish less, are they doing a less good job?

[Ben Lobb, Conservative, Huron—Bruce, ON]

Fair enough.

There are thousands of these administration people who work at universities. What are they doing? I look at it and I say, what's HR doing? They should be right in there talking to the deans and everybody else and saying this isn't right and let's get it fixed. Is that not happening?

[Dr. Susan Prentice]

I think my colleague is trying to weigh in on this.

[Ben Lobb, Conservative, Huron—Bruce, ON]

Okay, let's go.

[Dr. Tina Chen]

I think in an academic setting, this is where we need to think about the different responsibilities.

Here at the University of Manitoba, as many other places, the responsibilities for overseeing this comes through the provost's office. I would say here, at the University of Manitoba, there's a lot of work that is being done, such as around setting new guidelines for hiring.

Again, I think this is very similar to what Professor Boon was just speaking about in the University of Toronto situation as well. Ultimately it's the provost's office that monitors to ensure that equity-based approaches are part of our hiring processes, that we're having and entering into those discussions among people about what appropriate workloads are, and also deans report to it on what's happening.

I think what we're really addressing in terms of systemic inequities at the universities now is how we shift the culture so that the different departments—the units, those who are doing the hiring—are creating the very kinds of cultures that support equity.

I don't think we're really at the moment of “Can we hire those who are systemically marginalized and under-represented?” We can hire them, but are we going allow them to thrive—

[Ben Lobb, Conservative, Huron—Bruce, ON]

What does HR do? Is there an HR department at the University of Manitoba?

[Dr. Tina Chen]

Human resources oversees a lot of the staff appointments. They are doing the work in terms of addressing systemic inequities for staff, but faculty hiring actually happens through the provost's office, and that's where the monitoring happens.

[Ben Lobb, Conservative, Huron—Bruce, ON]

What's the dean or the chancellor of the school doing? Shouldn't that individual take charge and say we have to fix the system here?

[Dr. Tina Chen]

Yes, definitely. At the universities we see this happening at all levels. I work in the provost's office and I oversee the equity strategies. The provost messages them. We work with the deans for constant education and for monitoring.

What you want to see is a way of reporting and bringing everyone together at all the levels. Some units are more successful. As people have talked about, it's a bit of a carrot and stick as to where that's happening. However, on its own, as we sort of unfold those, we're working in collaboration.

What you have to do, though, is to make sure you're creating the spaces not only institutionally but also nationally with respect to what the expectations are. That's because it's very hard for any unit or faculty member to say, “Well, my job is to prioritize this type of work. I'm really invested in community-based work and teaching, but I can't get a national grant because they don't recognize it.”

[Ben Lobb, Conservative, Huron—Bruce, ON]

I'm just a regular guy. I'm from a small town. I look at this and the problem here is obvious. You have deans, and they don't report to HR. You don't know what the president of the university is doing. It's all right in front of their faces.

You have to help me here on this, because I see the problem and how HR can't work with the departments to set it up and make it right and how the board of directors of the university.... I'm not just picking on the University of Manitoba. It's almost like it's an abdication of their responsibility. You have all these professors trying to get a fair deal, and it seems to me as though the administrations are doing nothing. I don't know. Maybe I'm wrong. What do you think?

[Dr. Tina Chen]

I would actually just say that I do believe you're wrong on that.

[Ben Lobb, Conservative, Huron—Bruce, ON]

Okay.

[Dr. Tina Chen]

I think there's a lot of work being done, but we are working and dealing with what are centuries of institutional sexism, misogyny, transphobia, homophobia and racism. They're embedded in how we work and how we value people's work.

When that becomes embedded in a system, it's not simply one person saying that we should pay him or her better, because all of the ways in which society also values particular work—where it thinks that lies, where we think appropriate bodies are placed and whose bodies have value—become part of our institutions. It's not a lack of reporting and accountability, then; it actually requires an entire cognitive shift in how we see the world.

I'm mindful when I enter any room: Are there, in fact, people who are from racially marginalized groups present and being given voice to speak? How often are we hearing those voices? How often are we hearing the voices of the non-binary people speaking about inequities, or are people simply asking us, saying, “How come you can't solve the problem?”

I think this is where we have to think about the systemic issues that are at the site and also understand that in a university, it is in fact the deans. There are numerous levels of reporting, but as we build those cultures, we have to also be valuing: It's not just what you pay and what you agree to pay people, but also how you treat them.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Corey Tochor]

Thank you so much for that. We're a minute over.

We're moving on to MP Diab for five minutes.

[Lena Metlege Diab, Liberal, Halifax West, NS]

Thank you very much.

Professors, thanks to all of you for coming and giving us testimony.

Ms. Chen, I am learning a lot from your testimony. I very much appreciate the candid responses you are giving. We're studying a gap in this particular field, but I'd say gaps probably exist in so many fields across our society.

I have a question for Professor Boon. I was very excited to hear of your study, and I can't wait for 2024, when you release the statistics you're talking about.

You talked about two streams and tenure and teaching and how there were very minimal differences and no difference, actually, in the teaching between the two.

I'm wondering if you account for part-time faculty, faculty on contracts, librarians and clinical faculty. Before you answer that, I'm also wondering about the following: You've now said you've instituted a hiring process in which about 50% are women. When was that instituted, and what do you currently have in terms of percentages between the two genders—or the different genders, I guess—in the university? That's just to see whether the statistics you have looked into, showing that there was a minimal statistical difference, represent a fair percentage of the gender.

[Prof. Heather Boon]

We have these results publicly available and we refresh them annually. I don't know the exact amounts, but we are very close to gender parity in both our assistant professor and our associate professor ranks. In the full professor rank, which is the senior scientists, we have more men than women, and that's legacy hiring that was done more than 15 years ago, so it will take a while before we reach parity at that level.

We haven't instituted a rule that we have to hire 50% women. What we have done is spend a lot of time asking people to think deeply and talk about that culture that Susan and Tina mentioned. How do we value people's careers and trajectories? How do we value the things they have done? What does excellence look like, ensuring that we are taking a broad perspective of that and thinking about people who may have non-traditional career paths, for example, and those kinds of things, and making a very deliberate attempt to encourage people with diverse backgrounds to apply for our ads?

Lo and behold, when you have a diverse applicant pool and you think broadly about what excellence looks like, you hire approximately 50% men and women, and other diverse candidates as well—

[Lena Metlege Diab, Liberal, Halifax West, NS]

I have another question for you within the couple of minutes we have.

We know the pandemic has significantly affected, I would say, more women in the workplace, particularly those who have small children. How do you account for that and the fact that women have babies? That's a fact of life, and when they do, they take time off.

How do you account for that in university settings with respect to promotions, tenure and the issues we're talking about?

[Prof. Heather Boon]

We have very generous leaves for women, because you're absolutely right: When a woman takes a leave, her tenure clock stops. In the university, you have a maximum number of years in most universities, and you go up in your sixth year for this tenure review. When someone is on leave, we stop the clock, so that year doesn't count. Many women and men take more than one leave.

We also try to normalize leave. People takes leaves for all kinds of reasons. It can be for child-rearing. It can be for illness. We remind our colleagues, when someone comes up for tenure, that no, they didn't get eight years, and therefore they should have more publications. They had the same number of years of active career work as everyone else.

Again, it's normalizing how many people take leaves. Yes, women take more, but about 25% or so—that's a rough estimate—of our faculty have taken at least one year of leave and stopped the tenure clock when they went up for tenure. We remind colleagues of that.

That's how we—

[Lena Metlege Diab, Liberal, Halifax West, NS]

Professor Chen, how do you deal with it at the University of Manitoba?

[Dr. Tina Chen]

I would say that our policies are quite similar to what Heather said. In particular, it's part of our collective agreement with the union, so we have a very well laid out process. I think the normalizing of leaves is a key part of that, and I think you mentioned it earlier about when you were asking about full time. This is where we see the difference in types of experiences.

We can normalize leaves and we can think about support for people who are taking leaves for a variety of reasons here at the University of Manitoba. We're also very particularly concerned about indigenous faculty and those who are in ceremony or have different types of child care and family responsibilities, and the way that shapes their lives.

Where we don't have a similar way of addressing the inequities or the way people's personal lives impact the workplace, and how COVID has exacerbated some of that, is with the “precariat”—the part-time instructors—and those inequities are indeed getting bigger. The evidence isn't fully there, but we all know what's happening.