One of the benefits of the Royal Commission on Equality in Employment, as Justice Rosalie Silberman Abella pointed out way back in 1984, is that we have to look not just at the academy, for example, but at the wider society in terms of these kinds of issues.
Yes, we do need to look at extenuating circumstances. We know, for example, that women do more parental care, child care and family care, and that care work is uncompensated. At the same time, those who have less of that care work have the ability, obviously, to do, say, more publication. There's a balancing act that we have to deal with, which has nothing to do with excellence, knowledge or capabilities. It is the circumstances.
The second thing I would say about the balancing of a parental leave is that we now have parental leave, so spouses can take leave. I'll give you an example from COVID-19. When you look at the care work done by women and men, for example, and look at the binary division, men were publishing more during the COVID pandemic. Women were taking care of children and taking care of their parents. They were actually working online plus doing all these things because kids were at home. How do you deal with the fallout from that? If you take maternal leave, your salary is also then frozen. What EDI policies do is help to mitigate some of this potential unevenness that is not about your excellence, your capabilities or what you achieve, but about these other circumstances.
There's some work to do. Universities, colleges and CEGEPs are going a long way to address these issues. I also think the tri-agencies and their funding criteria are doing a lot to balance these things for the graduate students now, for the post-docs and certainly for new scholars as well as senior scholars.