UW tops gender equity targets

School president reports results at UN General Assembly

WATERLOO — The University of Waterloo has exceeded its targets when it comes to introducing more women into faculty positions and senior leadership ranks, and getting more girls and women interested in science and math courses.

But there is still more to do, says president Feridun Hamdullahpur.

“The best and the brightest are out there,” he said in an interview Wednesday. “We needed to remove all the obstacles that prevented them from coming to the university.”

The university’s top leader was at the United Nations on Wednesday to “summarize our accomplishments” to the UN General Assembly in New York City.

Since starting the HeForShe initiative three years ago, the school has surpassed its initial goals for gender equity.

The university focused on three key areas: increasing the number of female faculty across campus, adding more women to the senior leadership ranks, and encouraging young women to come to Waterloo and enjoy science, technology, math and engineering studies.

“We wanted to see much stronger representation,” Hamdullahpur said.

The university offered scholarships to encourage more women to enter the areas of science and math.

“These things just didn’t happen on their own. We had to have a proper strategy in place,” he said.

That meant admitting the university’s shortcomings and correcting them, he said.

“The world we see is not truly representative at the university unless we really make a big difference,” he said.

UW equalized the wage gap to ensure female faculty members were paid the same as their male counterparts. In recruiting in the STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) fields, it was often said that the pool of qualified females was too shallow, Hamdullahpur said.

“That wasn’t true at all,” he said. “The pool was just fine.”

But the path from the pool to the university was not clear, he said. Hamdullahpur said changes began to happen when the administration looked into its hiring practices and “removed all conscious and unconscious” biases.

“We gave them a clear message about our commitment right from the top and all the way to the student body,” he said.

Waterloo committed to increase the number of girls and women in its STEM outreach programs to 33 per cent by 2020. It is currently at 32 per cent.

For female faculty representation, UW wanted 30 per cent to be women by 2020. It is now at 30.1 per cent. And for female leaders in administration, the university wanted female representation to reach 29 per cent by 2010. Today, it is at 32 per cent.

The university, the only Canadian post-secondary school to participate in the HeForShe initiative, has more work to do, Hamdullahpur said.

“Things will become so natural, so obvious that even putting targets will seem meaningless,” he said “This is what I want to achieve. This is my ultimate goal. It’s not too far.”