Waterloo faculty job only for 'women, transgender, non-binary, or two-spirit' [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

Waterloo faculty job only for 'women, transgender, non-binary, or two-spirit' [pdf]

uwaterloo.ca

54 pointsversion_five30 comments

As a UW grad myself, I find myself wishing u/version_five would have posted a top-level comment providing the context of why they feel this is an interesting thing to share to HN. I suspect that might have helped set the tone for a more useful discussion.

Three people elsewhere in this thread have commented:

(1) wondering if "there is a website that tracks these things"

(2) asking whether or not this contravenes the Candian Human Rights Act

(3) wondering why Waterloo is being singled out

I don't know much about these topics. Handily, though, the job posting itself seems to address the spirit of these questions by:

(1) citing multiple studies over a period of several years showing that women are under-represented in full-time faculty positions generally and Canada Research Chairs specifically

(2) citing the Ontario Human Rights Commission which permits government programs (for example, the Canada Research Chair program), to be discriminatory if they attempt to ameliorate or remediate discrimination elsewhere

(3) citing UW's 2020-2025 strategic plan that identifies UW in particular as under-representing women on faculty.

For additional context, UW's IAP [1] system shows that as of 2019, Waterloo ranked at the very bottom of the U15 Group of Canadian Research Universities for percentage of full-time, regular, faculty members who identify as female. I don't know how the Faculty of Environment compares to the broader university.

I can understand people not liking affirmative action. But... the questions that were posed thus far in the comments _were_ actually addressed in the job posting, at least, in spirit.

[1]: https://uwaterloo.ca/institutional-analysis-planning/univers...

> providing the context of why they feel this is an interesting thing to share to HN.

It is about a job posting, for a science related field, from a top research university with requirements that are unique and not particularly common for such fields.

I think that makes its very interesting. I don't think I have ever heard of a university having such qualifications spelled out so explicitly.

Do you feel bad about what your alma mater is doing? I do.

> Waterloo ranked at the very bottom of the U15 Group of Canadian Research Universities for percentage of full-time, regular, faculty members who identify as female.

Please explain why that is a bad thing

> I can understand people not liking affirmative action.

"Affirmative action" is obviously an Orwellian propaganda term. The correct description is quotas for the groups currently favoured by the blob.

And I think ridicule is the only thing this deserves:

> "I am glad that I managed to write 'The Crucible,'" Arthur Miller wrote, "but looking back I have often wished I'd had the temperament to do an absurd comedy, which is what the situation deserved."

IANAL, but this seems explictly illegal according to the Canadian Human Rights Act[1]? Is there a court ruling that says "yeah but it's only illegal if you're discriminating against an oppressed group"? I'm not sure why the university would expose themselves to so much legal risk.

[1] https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/h-6/fulltext.html

No one looking for a faculty job is going to file a lawsuit. It would be a quick path to becoming persona non grata.

You don’t need to really be looking for the job, just apply, get rejected, and file suit.

Although presumably someone else, who didn't particularly want such a position, could file it.

The job posting links to: https://www.ohrc.on.ca/en/your-guide-special-programs-and-hu... which says:

"The Code and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms[1] both recognize the importance of addressing historical disadvantage by protecting special programs to help marginalized groups. The Supreme Court of Canada has also recognized the need to protect “programs” established by legislation that are designed to address the conditions of a disadvantaged group.[2]"

I call recall looking at admissions in Canada way back and they had spots in various programs reserved for First Nations - for example, dental school had 110 spots, with 10 reserved for First Nations.

So not a new concept I guess.

Yes, Canada has a long history of discrimination.

So now we just discriminate the other way to rectify it!

I much prefer these restrictions be made explicit, rather than the hiring committee silently discarding all the applications coming in from groups they are not currently interested in.

It's a very bad move to make it explicit, if you can implicitly coordinate and hide your real intentions, by virtue of your colleagues mostly agreeing with you, while telling others a flattering tale of how principled and virtuous you're being. The latter takes much more effort to expose.

For a recent example, see the pleasing fable journalists give for when they consider race "relevant" [1] or "pertinent" [2] to a story, versus the venal reality exposed by a Washington Free Beacon project [3] sampling almost a thousand stories to suss out their real behavior.

[1] https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/When-Is-a-Suspect-s-Race...

[2] https://www.cleveland.com/readers/2014/07/the_complex_issue_...

[3] https://freebeacon.com/media/yes-the-media-bury-the-race-of-...

I wonder about things that aren’t always visible.

What kind of questions would they ask if they thought someone wasn’t truthful about their status?

I presume this article has been flagged not because of what the University of Waterloo is doing, but rather that it is felt that the link on HN is for the purpose of subjecting progressive ideology to ridicule?

It would be flagged because people clicked the links. Why could be any number of reasons… almost certainly a variety.

Pretend to be non-binary, problem solved.

Then you'd be in the same shitty position as whoever actually gets this job, everyone will think you are there for some silly diversity quota and not a serious researcher. Better to go somewhere that actually hires people for their merits (which I think is outside canada at this point)

I wonder if someone pretending would be less by it.

This will be like catnip to HN. Only thing better would be if this was for a marketing position lol.

Even this is a from socialist Canada, can't anyone see the 800 lbs gorrilla in the room? DISCRIMINATION LAWSUIT...

This is way more common has become routine recently. I wonder why Waterloo is being singled out.

>This is way more common has become routine recently

Is there a website/document that tracks these things? I've heard of universities having quotas for students based on ethnicity, but this is the first time I seen a document that explicitly said the position was closed to CIS male candidates.

what exactly is two-spirit?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-spirit

lgbt co-opting and rebranding of a traditional native-american 'boy prostitute' role

As someone close with a two-spirit person, this is the most offensive and ignorant thing i’ve seen on this topic by far.

Unfortunately, being offended doesn't make you correct:

> The neologism two-spirit was created in English, then translated into Ojibwe, in 1990 at the third annual Native American/First Nations gay and lesbian conference in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, as a replacement for the offensive, anthropological term, berdache.

> The primary purpose of coining a new term was to encourage the replacement of the outdated, and offensive, anthropological term berdache, which means "passive partner in sodomy, boy prostitute"

(from https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-spirit#Etymology)

By my reading, the definition of berdache existed in the 1600s, and in is original European context, refers to '"passive homosexual", "catamite" or even "boy prostitute"' (quoting Wikipedia.)

Europeans didn't have a gender framework that could handle concepts outside of "male/female":"man/woman" so some re-used that French term meaning broadly to include what Europeans would now describe as transvestite, transgender, hermaphrodite, and homosexual people. See http://www.williamapercy.com/wiki/images/archive/20070205170...

You can see from the examples that while "berdache"/"two-spirit" was widespread in Native American cultures, there wasn't a "traditional native-american 'boy prostitute' role".

In addition to "berdache" being re-used to mean non-gender-binary-conformant, the term as used in the scientific literature carried with it European prejudice which didn't reflect the native understanding:

> literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries regarded the berdache as a “creature of failed biology, for example, hermaphroditism [...], or failed morals [...], or as someone not able to live up to an expected norm” (Herdt in Jacobs et al. 280). -- quoting https://www.proquest.com/openview/c98c4f83e2910bd20e6b3ebb6b...

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