An Historical Perspective: Reflections on the Western Employment Equity Award
Bibliographic record
Abstract
On November 12, 1986, the University of Western Ontario was awarded the Employment Equity Award by the Ontario Women's Directorate. It was the ensuing public celebration of Western's achievements that inspired this essay, which came to be known as the Backhouse Report. Constance Backhouse was one of many women on campus who believed that the award was somewhat “premature.” She undertook to examine the University's record in more detail, to compile a more thorough and accurate report on the employment status of faculty women at Western. This essay, researched and drafted over many months during 1987 and 1988, considers Western's statistics within a national and historical context, filling out this profile with data from historical records and interviews that bring to life the experiences of women who taught at the University from as early as 1915. In this report, Backhouse documents a wide range of employment practices bearing on the appointment of faculty women, their compensation, tenure, promotion, and retirement. It seems clear that persistently low levels of representation of women reflect a long history of overt discrimination and of more covert patterns of exclusion and devaluation. Backhouse argues, on this basis, that any effective response to gender inequity on campus must address these root problems, and must, moreover, give up the pious hope that change will come “naturally”. Institutional structures and policies require rigorous review; women's concerns must receive strong representation at the highest levels of the University administration; and above all, the University needs to set explicit goals for improving the representation of women, coupled with clearly defined sanctions for those who fail to meet these goals. Given the limited success of previous attempts to improve Western's record on equity, the lesson Backhouse drew in the late 1980s was that more wide-ranging and aggressive strategies would be necessary if progress were to be realized.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.024 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".