Are there too many women on the board of directors of the Bois-de-Boulogne college? A new directive to encourage the recruitment of “male candidates” for the next members of the council makes the student association jump and raises eyebrows for an expert.
During the meeting of February 22, the directors considered a series of selection criteria recommended by the governance and ethics committee. Among these, preference is given to “male candidates to bring parity closer to the council”, can we read in what was proposed, and then adopted, by the council.
The Board has about twenty members, mostly women, and was looking for two people in a call for candidates issued on January 19.
“It discriminates against the commitment of women, on the pretext that there are too many women on the board of directors”, launches Laurence St-Amand, in charge of institutional affairs at the General Student Association of Bois-de-Boulogne (AGEBdeB ) and student representative on the board of directors.
She was absent during the council meeting and learned the news afterwards. She adds that women have historically been discriminated against in positions of power, more than men, and that there is still a long way to go.
“If we look at the fact that there are 20% of women on CAs in Quebec… It makes no sense to advocate a principle of parity when women are less present than men on CAs in general “, she believes. According to data released by Statistics Canada last year, the proportion of women on boards of directors in the province fell from 19.0% in 2017 to 19.4% in 2018.
“Parity concerns above all people who experience injustice,” adds Ludmila Hérault, communications assistant at AGEBdeB and coordinator of the women’s committee. She says she is shocked. “It’s important that there are men on the board, but it’s a voluntary commitment, and men have never been prevented from running,” she adds.
In response to the events, the women’s committee of the student association distributed a letter on campus on March 8, International Women’s Day, to denounce the situation and invite all “shocked, disappointed and angry” students and professors to write to the board.
The College did not respond to our interview requests.
Diversity rather than parity
“My first instinct was to tell myself that this is an absurd situation,” points out Diane Gagné, professor and director of the School of Management at the Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières (UQTR), who works on diversity issues. “It’s distorting what we mean by parity. And on the majority of boards, there aren’t enough women,” she says.
In the particular case of the college of Bois-de-Boulogne, she thinks that the principle of diversity should be put forward rather than that of parity. “The word is not right when we talk about parity on a board of directors. The real question is who is there, and what diversity we have, and why aren’t the men there? she says.
In general, when choosing members of a board, she thinks that it is better to focus on the question of the representation of racialized people, different age groups, or socio-economic status, rather than to the gender of people.