Mac’s Rina Fraticelli recognized by governor general
Award recognizes those advancing gender equality
The director of McMaster University’s Socrates Project is one of six Canadian women honoured this week for their achievements in advancing gender equality.
Rina Fraticelli received the Governor General’s Award in Commemoration of the Persons Case — an honour bestowed annually on Oct. 18 in celebration of Persons Day, which marks the day in 1929 when the decision to include women in the legal definition of “persons” was handed down by Canada’s highest court of appeal.
In April, Fraticelli assumed the role of director of the Socrates Project — McMaster’s new forum where artists, scholars and the community can come together to engage on critical issues.
Having devoted her career to addressing gender inequity issues in Canada’s arts and cultural industries, she co-founded Women in View — a national not-for-profit dedicated to improving gender and racial diversity on and off screen — in 2008 and has worked to strengthen opportunities for women in theatre, literature, media and public life since the late ’70s.
The honour comes at an “exciting” and “pivotal” moment for questions of gender and racial equity, Fraticelli said.
“The work that I have been doing over the last number of years, particularly with Women in View, was mostly sparked by an era of denial that there was a problem and just deciding that we needed cold, hard facts and statistics to illustrate the problem,” she said. “The minimum we can say is that we’ve moved past that, and there is a more general agreement that the inequity exists and it’s bad for everybody.”
While Fraticelli said she is excited by the recognition of the work of her and her colleagues, it’s crucial that progress continues to be made.
“At the same time, it’s important to remember that we’ve been at a similar point before in the late ‘80s where we thought there was such an era of recognition that we were just going to continuously move forward, if slowly, and in fact we lost a lot of ground in the ’90s,” she noted. “I think it’s a great opportunity to start making really systematic changes so that we don’t see that rollback again, particularly in a fairly worrisome culture.”
Other recipients of the awards, which were created in 1979, include Rina Arseneault, Shirley Cuillierrier, Charlotte Hrenchuk, Hélène Lee-Gosselin and Alana Robert.