Gender issues

                                                                                                      There are many statements by faculty explaining why they lack confidence in the University of British Columbia’s Board of Governors . Our BoG is dominated by political appointees who represent a narrow band of British Columbians: wealthy business people who donate to the Liberal Party. Some of these appointees appear to break tax and FIPPA laws. Our BoG has little faculty voice: compare the 3 on our Board (15%) to the 12 on UofT ’s (25%). Our BoG is unique among its peers in not belonging to the Association of Governing Boards ,* which provides guidelines for best practices in selecting and training board members, managing conflicts of interest, and conducting business in a transparent and accountable way. These structural weaknesses of our Board undermine good governance at UBC. But for me, it boils down to this: over the last eight months, our BoG has openly disregarded, disrespe

Today I resigned from the  UBC Presidential Search Committee .

The following are my notes from Naomi Ellemers ' presentation today in the Bias Interrupters Working Group at the University of California Santa Barbara California. It was exciting to meet her in person after admiring and using her work on social identity for years. Benefits of Diversity The benefits of diversity are now well documented. For example, Peterson Institute and Ernst & Young  studied 21,980 publicly traded companies in 91 countries and found the presence of women in corporate leadership increases profitability of a company.  Richard Freeman and Wei Huang found that more ethnically diverse research teams of scientists attracted more citations to their publications. Londa Schiebinger at Stanford, a historian of science, looks at " gendered innovations " and finds that disciplines where women enter see that the questions women ask are different, the methodologies they use are different, the discipline starts seeing more innovative questions, methods, and di