The Star’s Victoria Gibson talks to four women from Victoria about their home
Gillian Worley, 24, electrical engineering co-op student
After three years in Victoria, Worley said she sincerely loves the city.
“I feel safe to walk and bike around at night,” she said.
In her experience, she said the city was accepting of “all those who identify as women, and is encouraging of uniqueness and authenticity.”
“That being said, I speak from a place of majority demographic,” she cautioned, though she said that it was her hope that minority groups would say the same thing about their city. There was a sense of camaraderie, she said, among her female friends and other women in the community that wasn’t felt in other cities she’s lived in.
She spent two years in Vancouver, and found it busier and less personal.
“Even though Victoria is a city, it feels smaller because women seem to look out for each other. I would agree that Victoria is one of the best Canadian cities for women for these reasons.”
Boma Brown, 26, Support Network for Indigenous Women & Women of Colour founder
Brown, previouslythe U.S., who’shas lived beenof in Nigerianin Botswana Victoria descentandfor sixin and years.more diverseWhile thein that city time,has becomeshe said, it’s still difficult for a Black woman.
“I think living in Victoria is, I don’t know if unique is the right word, but it’s an interesting experience,” she told the Star by phone.
“Victoria is on the West Coast, so it’s really beautiful and the weather is great and I think that attracts a lot of immigrants and people who are retired and tourists and things like that. So in that regard it’s really awesome. But the unfortunate reality is for a person who is a woman of colour who moved here there isn’t a lot of community.”
She said a lot of people who move to the city, particularly from other countries, can end up feeling isolated “in terms of having people who look like you, who speak your language, who eat the food you like to eat.”
For a long time after moving to Victoria, she would travel to Toronto twice a year with an empty suitcase to pick up all the food she couldn’t get at home.
And in 2014 she founded the Support Network for Indigenous Women & Women of Colour, hoping to support other women experiencing the same possible feelings of isolation.
Bobbi Turner, 60, executive director of Island Sexual Health
Tuesday was the first Turner had heard of Victoria being ranked so highly for women, and she laughed when thinking about what to say.
“Golly, that’s an interesting question,” she said. “It’s not one I’ve ever really thought about.”
The Island Sexual Health clinic where Turner works had over 22,000 patient visits last year — predominantly women — and she said it’s becoming the only medical resource for many.
“It’s extremely difficult right now for anyone to get a family physician,” Turner said of the city. “So from a health-care perspective, this doesn’t bode as well for women in Victoria.”
The majority of their clients don’t have a family doctor, making it difficult to access health care outside the realm of sexual health.
“This is, for many of them, the only place that they can go to get services.”
Kaitlin Ruether, 23, full-time student
Ruether moved to Toronto this fall after five years in Victoria.
“In terms of safety, or the feeling of safety, Victoria definitely feels like the safest place I’ve ever lived,” Ruether wrote in a Facebook message. “I think it has to do with the city’s mentality of community and this atmosphere it has of a town — or at least the small city off the coast of Vancouver.”
Since moving to Toronto, though, she said that she’s found a higher focus on ideas of diversity and equality between men and women. Some of the smaller-city features of Victoria, which made it feel safe to live in, also led to more difficulty when it came to seizing opportunities.
“It feels harder to work your way into anything, and even more so as a woman,” she wrote.
So, for her, being in Toronto meant increasing the possibilities in her life. With files from Alexandra Jones