Bright minds recall darkness of Polytechnique massacre
On Dec. 6, we mourn the 14 women who were gunned down 29 years ago
Every year, Montreal pauses to mourn the 14 women murdered at École Polytechnique, a massacre that haunts this city 29 years later. Geneviève Bergeron, Hélène Colgan, Nathalie Croteau, Barbara Daigneault, Anne-Marie Edward, Maud Haviernick, Barbara Klucznik, Maryse Laganière, Maryse Leclair, Anne-Marie Lemay, Sonia Pelletier, Michèle Richard, Annie St-Arneault and Annie Turcotte were targeted because they were women at an engineering school. They were 14 bright lights, cruelly extinguished. The passage of time does not heal this deep and permanent wound, but it does perhaps make us wiser and stronger. One of the enduring legacies of a crime so heinous it beckons fresh tears year after year, is quiet defiance of the gunman’s misogynistic intentions. He-whodoes-not-deserve-to-be-named separated the women from the men during his cowardly attack — as if this would halt the growing interest of women in traditionally male-dominated professions. His hateful deed only hardened the resolve of many more women to follow their hearts into STEM — science, technology, engineering and mathematics.
The shooting has inspired countless scholarships and bursaries, prizes and programs to fling the doors open wider for women and nurture the dreams and ambitions of young female talent. Before and since Polytechnique, women have distinguished themselves in STEM, while opportunities for girls are increasingly being championed. Although these disciplines are still predominantly male, and progress is at times uneven, the ground is shifting. Fear has not and will not deter the curious, determined and brilliant from making their mark alongside men in crucial areas of research and rewarding professions. Our Governor General, Julie Payette, is a distinguished astronaut, fighter pilot and scientist. Canada’s chief science adviser is Mona Nemer, a graduate of McGill University, former pharmacology professor at Université de Montréal and one-time director of the cardiac genetics unit at the Montreal Clinical Research Institute. The principal and vice-rector of McGill is Suzanne Fortier, who previously chaired the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. The Gina Cody School of Engineering and Computer Science at Concordia University is the first engineering faculty in Canada to take a woman’s name — a potent and meaningful symbol of change given this city’s tragic history. Dec. 6 is a sombre day in Montreal, and always will be. But it should also be a moment to celebrate the achievements of women in STEM, reflect on progress and examine what remains to be done. In flipping the script, we honour the memory of our fallen sisters, salute the work of women we look to as shining examples, and kick down the last barriers for new generations.
GINA CODY
Gina Cody is executive chair of the board of CCI Group, a consulting engineering firm in Toronto. She received her master’s from Concordia University in 1981 and became the first woman to graduate from the school with a PhD in building engineering in 1989. She has a slew of awards to show for a 30-year career during which she was sometimes the only woman in the room. After a $15-million gift to her alma mater, her name now graces the faculty of engineering and computer science at her alma mater. Growing up in a family of five children in Iran, Cody said she was always encouraged by her parents. “My mother, who never finished high school and got married young, wanted her daughters to be independent. She always said that education was the way to do that,” Cody recalled. “I was always fixing things up. If the radio wasn’t working, if the TV wasn’t working, if the chair was broken, I was the one fixing it. “The attitude was, ‘I can do it, I should do it, I want to do it.’ ” Cody said she never paid much attention to sexism or gender barriers during her career. “At times I look back and think I was a little oblivious to it,” she said. Cody experienced her fair share of whistles, inappropriate comments and calendars featuring naked women on construction sites — often branded materials sent by suppliers as corporate holiday gifts, she noted. “I remember at the office where I worked, I would turn (the calendar) around, then the next day it would be back. Then I would turn it around again, and the next day it would be back again. And on and on until one day I just said, ‘Really guys? Really?’ And then it disappeared.” A bigger challenge was the double standard that as a woman, she had to be better and couldn’t afford to make mistakes. “I would just really work hard. If I wasn’t sure about something, I would stay up at night reading about it if I had to,” she said. “You had to overcome their biases. I think it’s a bit easier now but it’s not completely gone.” Cody had left Montreal by the time the shooting occurred at Polytechnique, but it hit close to home. “It did leave a scar, a deep scar,” she said. “It had a deep, profound impact on me and it makes me emotional to talk about it.” Cody said she has met female engineers who say they were initially frightened or discouraged from entering the profession, but nevertheless persisted. Cody said this is why it is so important a woman’s name today adorns an engineering faculty. “I am hoping that with what I have done that women feel stronger, feel that ‘I belong’ and don’t even question it,” Cody said. “It’s not about me. I don’t want it to be about me. It’s more about the message. And for me the message is women belong to this profession. It doesn’t matter what race you are, what ethnicity, gender or colour. You belong.”
JOELLE PINEAU
On Tuesday, Pineau was among six McGill academics named to the inaugural cohort of research chairs in artificial intelligence by the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. Pineau is an associate professor at McGill and the site lead for Facebook’s AI Research lab in Montreal. Despite being at the top of a cutting-edge field, Pineau nearly decided to enter the performance music stream at McGill and when she did enrol in engineering at the University of Waterloo, she didn’t know how to code. This, along with having done all of her schooling in French up until then, were the main hurdles Pineau overcame. “I was aware of gender. I was in a class of about 80 students where 15 of us were women,” she said. “I didn’t experience it as a barrier during those years.” She recalls attending a commemoration service each year for the women who died at Polytechnique, and she was a recipient of a 1989 memorial fellowship in her graduating year. Pineau dispels any remaining myths that engineering, mathematics or computer science are dull. The problems she works on are very real and human, from fighting climate change to reducing poverty and from improving health care to communicating across languages. One of her research projects involves trying to build a better wheelchair “Once you get into the field you find that it’s incredibly rich, incredibly diverse. It’s not just sitting in front of a computer staring at a screen all day,” Pineau said. “In reality, it’s just about solving problems, solving puzzles and doing it with other people at a very high level. “On Dec. 6, Pineau said she feels a “duty of remembrance.” “It’s a reminder that some people who were remarkably talented did not get a chance to contribute. We still face a lot of gender equality challenges in our field. Many experience micro-aggressions on a daily basis,” she said. “But I feel the duty even more for the next generation, so that the community keeps on improving, so that the women who join this community in the next 10, 20 years find a more egalitarian community.”
DOINA PRECUP
Doina Precup was among 39 researchers across Canada and six at McGill named research chairs in artificial intelligence by CIFAR on Tuesday. Precup, an expert in machine learning and brains, is also an associate professor at McGill, the associate scientific director for Healthy Brains for Healthy Lives at the Canada First Research Excellence Fund and site director of the Google-affiliated DeepMinds Montreal. She grew up in Communist Romania, where she said girls getting into STEM was totally normal. “My mom and two grandmas were in computer science, mathematics and engineering. So it was absolutely natural for me to go in STEM, and quite usual,” she said. “I was not aware of a ‘gender gap’ until coming to North America for my PhD.” Despite this, Precup said she has been “blessed” working in positive environments with supportive colleagues and has found a great sense of collegiality and collaboration among her fellow researchers. “Modern science and technology are very complex, so the age of one individual sitting in an office and coming up with brilliant ideas on their own is over,” Precup said. “We work in teams, and we all have strengths and weaknesses.” AI and machine learning has grown tremendously in recent
The message is women belong to this profession. It doesn’t matter what race you are, what ethnicity, gender or colour. You belong.
years, which Precup said is “exciting and positive.” But although the absolute number of women in the field as risen, she said the overall proportion has gone down and there is a dearth of women in leadership positions. “This is especially problematic, because having role models that can help you imagine yourself in this type of position is quite important,” she said.
SARAH DORNER
Sarah Dorner is an associate professor of civil engineering at Polytechnique Montréal. She holds the Canada Research Chair in Microbial Contaminant Dynamics in Source Waters, and is a member of both the NSERC Industrial Chair on Drinking Water and the Research development and validation centre for water treatment technologies and processes. Working at Polytechnique, Dorner said the memory of Dec. 6 is strong. Every year, the women in the faculty go to lunch. Dorner was in high school when the horror happened, and she said the news had a deep impact. “It may have even factored into my decision to study engineering. It was kind of like an act of resistance,” said Dorner. “I feel shy talking about it because I work with women who were there that day.” She also won a scholarship in memory of the victims when she was doing her PhD. There have definitely been obstacles as a woman in engineering, Dorner said, starting with the first-year prof who made jokes about having to slow down his lectures for all the new female students. Some have been administrative, like being the first Canada Research Chair holder to take maternity leave at Polytechnique. She said it still amazes her that she knows the first woman to ever graduate with a civil engineering degree from the school and the first professor to ever request maternity leave. “Every obstacle I’ve had to push has fallen. It added a little bit of friction, so every obstacle slows you down a bit, but there are ways around them,” she said. “The positive message I have is that barriers do fall. “I’m coming from a fairly privileged background but we still have a lot of work to do to make engineering more inclusive.”