I am a woman and I evolve in a discipline largely dominated by men: philosophy. The day I did my doctoral exams at Laval University, while I waited nervously in the room provided for this purpose — the room where the photos of all the deans of the Faculty of Philosophy since its creation are displayed until today — I remember being struck by this observation: hey, there are only men. And only white men.
In the Department of Philosophy where I teach, out of the thirty professors who make it up, eight are women and two people are from visible minorities. It is not a very different picture from the one found in many circles.
However, very few people will be moved by facts like these. Because we consider such discrimination as “normal”. “Normal” in the sense that it is what we have become socially accustomed to. What seems revolting, on the other hand, is when we decide to openly discriminate against those who have the privilege of not suffering from any discrimination by default: white men.
Let’s be honest, women and people from minority groups are regularly discriminated against. So regularly that the figures betray what some do not want to admit: systemic discrimination exists. If they didn’t exist, we wouldn’t have all these difficulties in establishing some form of representative equality. Hence the discriminatory measures applied by Laval University in the context of a competition to fill positions in Canada Research Chairs (CRC) in biology, measures which were quickly denounced and deemed “exaggerated”.
“We don’t want to discriminate on one side, we shouldn’t discriminate on the other side either. This reaction is that of Minister Nadine Girault, who sat on the Anti-Racism Action Group created in 2020 by the government. It’s an interesting reaction, in that it seems to express what many people think. However, in my view, this shows a superficial understanding full of shortcuts. I would like to answer the minister: obviously we don’t want to discriminate! But between what we want and what really happens, there is a world. And it is in this that systemic discrimination is insidious. They happen despite our good will.
If we were in a truly egalitarian society, then I would say that we should not discriminate, neither on one side nor on the other. But we are not in an egalitarian society. We aspire to become one, it is very different.
Is it basically the transparency of a discriminatory process that annoys? Unknowingly discriminating against minority or marginalized groups is tolerable. But to discriminate openly with the intention of achieving better representativeness is a scandal. Aren’t we a little hypocritical?