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As Rosalie Abella, author of the 1984 Equality in Employment: A Royal Commission Report , maintained, it isn’t enough to pay lip service to people’s rights. “Unenforceable rights are no more satisfactory than unavailable ones,” she wrote in a summary of her report. “In a liberal democracy like ours, law is the expression of the public will. It is our most positive mechanism for protecting and maintaining what we value. That is why we turn to law asthe appropriate mechanism for overcoming systemic discrimination ... . The cry of ‘reverse discrimination’ is sometimes raised against equity programmes. On the contrary, it is the fair opening of the competition ... . As long as systemic barriers remain, women and minorities will remain unjustifiably in perpetual slow motion.”
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 lthough OCA was the first postsecondary institution to approve equity in principle, Ryerson Polytechnical Institute in Toronto was much quicker at actually implementing an equity programme. In fact, Ryerson had shown that between 1980 and 1985 the percentage of full-time women faculty members had increased only from twenty-six to twenty-eight per cent and that from 1986 on the proportion hadn’t grown at all. Ryerson’s voluntary equity programme wasn’t working.
In 1988, Ryerson’s board of governors approved a mandatory plan whereby fifty-seven of seventy-two male faculty members taking retirement over the next ten years would be replaced by women. The number was arrived at by comparing the proportion of women in the tenure stream of each department with the proportion of women in the general population holding the qualifications required for the position. In those departments where the percentage of qualified women on the faculty was lower than the percentage of qualified women in the general population, equity positions were designated. If a qualified woman isn’t found, the position is opened to men. OCA’s approach to equity was modelled on Ryerson’s.
In the spring of 1990, Ryerson received an award from the Ontario government for its employment-equity initiatives. The irony is that, because of a shortage of funds, Ryerson had by that time frozen all hiring. Faculty members who retire aren’t being replaced at all.
Before presenting its employment equity proposals to council in the spring of 1989, OCA’s status of women committee held a rally. Liz Magor, who shares the chair of the committee, is a sculptor whose work has been displayed at the illustrious Venice Biennale. She talked movingly about having dropped out of the Vancouver School of Art twenty years earlier. At the time she felt no-one was to blame but herself. Her teachers by and large were reasonable people. “I hadn’t noticed they were 100 per cent male because bus drivers were 100 per cent male and letter carriers were 100 per cent male. There was no real reason to start checking out gender as the problem.” She sat in class not connecting, thinking that she didn’t have what it took. The art history they taught her didn’t reflect her life and experience. “At that time,” she says now, “I assumed art history didn’t hold anything back. If I wasn’t reflected there, I didn’t deserve to be.”
Lisa Steele, the committee’s other chair and a video artist who was recently given a retrospective at the Art Gallery of Ontario, pointed out that the statistics for women teaching at OCA had remained static since the 1985 motion. The voluntary approach wasn’t working. “Without an equity plan,” she stated, “there will be no change ... . We are wasting massive amounts of female talent. All over the country, art institutions are training the women we need on our faculty.” Not only were there plenty of qualified women, she continued, but the equity programme that was being unveiled at OCA was non-threatening. No-one would be hurt by it.
The document containing the status of women committee’s proposals, “Equity 2000,” reported that periods taught by women tended to be concentrated in the summer and evening programmes where salaries were twenty-five per cent lower. The two largest departments in the college — communication and design, and fine arts — had no women on their hiring committees. The council and half its committees had no women faculty members on them. Only full-time faculty — almost eighty-six per cent of them men — could vote for those who represented them on the governing council. It’s not surprising, therefore, that the faculty on council have almost always been men.
Equity at OCA, continued >
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