Who do we see in Canadian children’s books? The Star’s second annual diversity survey tells the story

2020/12/19 Leave a comment

Good to have this survey and encouraging to see incremental progress:

Exclusive numbers gathered by the Toronto Star for the second year in a row show that, while the voices represented in children’s books published in this country are still overwhelmingly white, other voices are gaining incrementally.

Overall, publishers reported that, in 2019, 419 books with a Canadian author or illustrator were published in Canada, featuring 525 main characters.

Of those books, 37.5 per cent feature main characters who are white, a decrease of 8.2 per cent over 2018, while 29.3 per cent have main characters who are Black, Indigenous, East Asian or South Asian, an increase of 4.9 per cent over the previous year.

“I’m not surprised by what could be described as incremental change between the … surveys,” says Kate Edwards, executive director of the Association of Canadian Publishers. “Publishers typically work a couple of years in advance (sometimes more) and I expect we’ll see more change over time.”

The Star first took a snapshot of diversity in Canadian children’s book publishing last year, looking at the 2018 publishing year, with a Canadian book identified as being published in Canada and having a Canadian author or illustrator.

At the time, in a variety of interviews and conversations, a common message was being heard: that people of colour didn’t see themselves represented in the kids books published here. There was no official Canadian measurement of those books, but there was one in the U.S.

The Cooperative Children’s Book Centre in Wisconsin began tracking in 1985 how many books were published in the U.S. and, of those, how many were by Black authors and illustrators. Over time, they expanded to include First Nations, Asian/Pacific creators and others, developing a body of data.

“These numbers are important because they help create a framework from which we can work toward greater accountability in the children’s literature publishing industry,” says Rabia Khokhar, a teacher/librarian with the Toronto District School Board. “The numbers are a form of documentation and help us recognize where we are and where we need to continue striving to move toward.”

Last year, 76 per cent of publishers who were sent the survey replied; this year the response rate was still high at about 70 per cent. Those who didn’t respond were generally small publishers, some of whom may not have published any children’s books in 2019.

In the survey, we asked: How many Canadian-authored and/or illustrated children’s books did they publish in 2019 in three categories: Picture Books (ages zero to 8), Middle Grade Books (ages eight to 12) and Young Adult Books (ages 13 and older).

We then asked them to break down for each of those categories how many featured main characters who identified as one of the following: Black; Indigenous; East Asian; South Asian; white; other ethnicity; or animals (no ethnicity). We kept to main characters because if there is a white main character with non-white characters in only minor roles, the white person is still the dominant character.

Separately, we asked, for each category, how many were LGBTQ characters, visibly disabled characters and invisibly disabled (mental illness, learning disabilities).

Overall, white characters still make up the bulk of main characters with 197 of 525, or 37.5 per cent of all main characters, being white. That is, however, a drop from last year of 8.2 per cent.

Also overall, 154 books, or 29.3 per cent, contained main characters who were Black, Indigenous, South Asian or East Asian. That represented an increase over last year of 4.9 per cent, helped by a rise in middle-grade books with a 7.5 per cent increase. Young adult books actually recorded a decrease of 3.6 per cent year over year.

Break the numbers down into specific ethnicities and some groups are better represented than others.

According to Statistics Canada, 7,674,580 people, or just more than 22 per cent of those who filled out the 2016 census, identify as a visible minority out of a total population of 34,460,065. Of those, 1,198,545 or 3.5 per cent identify as Black; 1,924,635 or 5.6 per cent as South Asian; 1,858,690 or 5.4 per cent as East Asian; and 2,692,715 or eight per cent as another visible minority. Those who identified as Aboriginal made up just under five per cent of the population at 1,673,785.

Almost 78 per cent of the population, or 26,785,485 people, identify as not a visible minority. And 22 per cent of the population is identified as disabled.

So, in picture books this year, 11.5 per cent of main characters were Black, compared to 3.5 per cent of the population. By the time we get to middle-grade books, that number shrinks to 9.2 per cent and just five per cent for YA books. Indigenous characters featured well in picture books at 7.7 per cent, but in middle-grade books accounted for only 2.8 per cent of main characters.

The number of books featuring a main character who is visibly or invisibly disabled marked a positive change: 39 out of the 525 characters fell into those categories, while last year 28 characters did. Overall, that marks an increase of 2.7 per cent for visibly disabled characters, while invisibly disabled characters fell marginally year over year.

Dorothy Ellen Palmer, author of “Falling For Myself” and a disability activist, says she’s glad to see there’s been some improvement. She does think that there’s a special onus on publishers, especially with the pandemic “erasing disabled and senior voices” to “reclaim those voices and make sure they don’t disappear.” She also notes that “it’s critically important that some of these disabled characters and authors aren’t white … 23 per cent of every racialized community is disabled.”

Finally, we asked in a separate question how many of the writers/illustrators were persons of colour. Publishers reported that 75 of the authors and 53 of the illustrators were people of colour, while six of the authors and one of the illustrators had a visible or invisible disability. Some of those writers and illustrators might have worked on multiple books. A few publishers noted that they did not want to say whether someone was invisibly disabled if they hadn’t self-identified that way, so didn’t include them.

Our ultimate goal should be to move toward authentic and dynamic diverse representation both in the books as well as those writing them

“One of the challenges of getting diverse books published in Canada is the idea of ‘gatekeeping,’” Kokhar said. “We have to consider who is deciding which story is ‘of value’ and ‘worth’ publishing and sharing widely. There is power in having the privilege to choose or reject a story as well as creating and giving space to someone to share it.”

In a year when Black Lives Matter and social activism have been front and centre in the media, the publishing community has been forcefully nudged to address the issue.

“Along with response to the pandemic, anti-racism and equity initiatives have been a focus for ACP this year,” Edwards said. “Many companies are looking at issues like editorial bias and more equitable staff recruitment, with the goal of ensuring that the books they publish, and the people who produce them, reflect Canada’s diversity.”

Penguin Random House, for example, recently appointed Sue Kuruvilla to head its Random House Canada imprint. Kuruvilla has deep roots in marketing and is also a founding member of Canadian Black Standard, “a network and advocacy platform addressing systemic barriers to employment advancement and the inclusion of Black Canadian women in marketing.”

Kristin Cochrane, the publishing house’s CEO, said in a statement that she wanted to hire someone “who would bring us all a fresh perspective, someone who could find new ways to approach publishing on a book-by-book level and for the list as a whole.”

Jael Richardson, author and founder of the Festival of Literary Diversity, notes, as did Edwards, that it takes time for initiatives to end up in actual product.

“We have to count, we have to start asking these questions, but I don’t think any publisher should be congratulating themselves on what they’re doing at this point because, even if they’re doing good work, the important thing is going to be doing it over the long haul.”

In the U.K., the Centre for Literacy in Primary Education has undertaken a similar survey and is now on its third year.

Its latest survey reports that “the number of children’s books published in the UK over the last three years (2017-19) featuring characters from a Black, Asian or minority ethnic background has increased to 10% in 2019, rising from 4% in 2017, 7% in 2018 to 10% in 2019.”

The organization also pointed out that the characters remain “significantly under-represented in comparison to the UK primary school population where 33.5% of children are from a minority ethnic background.”

In terms of authors and illustrators of colour published in the UK, those have “grown to 8% … rising from less than 6% in 2017.”

The results of the Star’s first diversity survey were presented in February at the Treasure Mountain symposium of teacher/librarians in Toronto. While the survey measures whether authors or illustrators were of colour, LGBTQ or disabled, there is not a measure of whether the stories themselves were about them — as opposed to simply featuring characters that appeared diverse.

It was a concern Richardson raised when we spoke with her. “I’m concerned because one of the things I’m seeing a lot is colour washing where they’re colouring characters differently, but they’re not actually economically investing in the authors who could be writing more in-depth experiences, fiction and non-fiction.”

After seeing the survey presented, Toni Duval, a middle school teacher/librarian at the Peel District School Board and a volunteer at FOLD Kids, says that she asked herself the question, “What do I know deeply about the books on my shelves?”

So she started to take her own survey. “I thought, if I start to look at what’s on the shelves, and who are the authors, then I’m gonna get an idea of who is missing.”

She initially wanted her students to be involved because they could then tell her what was missing. COVID-19 didn’t allow that to happen. So, instead, she decided to bite off something smaller, and on her own during July.

She went back year by year, seeing which authors and what titles were on her shelves. “I sorted everything by publishing year,” she says. “And the further away I went from the present, the whiter my collection was. It was so blatant.”

Part of that is down to the books available for libraries to purchase, as well as distribution: getting them onto the shelves of libraries and into the hands of students. She also began cross-referencing, asking herself was an Asian writer writing about an Asian character?

Other librarians, she says, are interested in her work. “It’s getting people thinking about who’s on the shelves.” And increasing the diversity they represent so students see that their voices have value, too.

Duval questions the choices students are being given. “Not just giving a Black author to a Black student … but who else is reading those books? With the students I teach, I want them to understand so many lived experiences that they just feel like the world is represented to them and they don’t have this narrow view.”

Publishing the books is only one step in the process. Getting diverse books in the hands of all kids is the next step.

“There’s so many voices that, hopefully, will get a chance to be published,” said Duval. “And maybe those are going to be kids that I’m teaching that feel, ‘Yeah, I could tell my story.’”

Source: Who do we see in Canadian children’s books? The Star’s second annual diversity survey tells the story

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Ousted Black Google Researcher: ‘They Wanted To Have My Presence, But Not Me Exactly’

2020/12/19 Leave a comment

More on the Google controversy (whose initial code included “Don’t do evil,” removed in 2018):

When Google unceremoniously ousted Black researcher Timnit Gebru, she felt targeted.

“My theory is that they had wanted me out for a while because I spoke up a lot about issues related to black people, women, and marginalization,” Gebru said in an interview on NPR’s Morning Edition.

At Google, Gebru was the co-lead of the company’s Ethical Artificial Intelligence team, where she was able to parlay her passion for highlighting the societal effects of AI into academic papers that could shape Google’s largest products, like search.

Gebru co-founded Black in AI, a group formed to encourage people of color to pursue careers in artificial intelligence research.

For Google, bringing on Gebru lent credibility to the tech giant’s efforts in examining how technology can exacerbate systemic bias and discrimination. Yet she says Google’s support for Gebru only went so far.

“They wanted to have my presence, but not me exactly. They wanted to have the idea of me being at Google, but not the reality of me being at Google,” Gebru said.

On Wednesday, several of her former colleagues wrote a letter to Google CEO Sundar Pichai asking that Gebru be reinstated, saying her departure has “had a demoralizing effect on the whole of our team.” The researchers also asked that they not be subject to retaliation for supporting Gebru.

That fear is not unfounded. Google has a history of demoting and firing dissenting employees.

In 2018, tens of thousands of employees walked off the job to protest how Google handled sexual harassment cases, among other issues. Organizers say the company pushed them out.

More recently, the National Labor Relations Board accused Google of breaking the law by sacking employees who tried to unionize.

“Google built this whole company up on the idea that we’ll give you free food and a free coffee and pay you well and give you comfortable bean bags to work on as long as you toe the company line,” said William Fitzgerald, who spent a decade at Google working on communications.

Google’s official company policy is: “if you see something that you think isn’t right – speak up!”

What the policy does not state, according to Fitzgerald, is that speaking up can also mean being shown the door.

“Anyone who continues to challenge their power will get squashed or pushed out, and this is something that’s been happening at Google for years now and we’re only now hearing about it,” he said.

Inside Google, women of color and other underrepresented groups who looked up to Gebru have been especially shaken, said former Google employee Ifeoma Ozoma.

“There are serious concerns around her identity as a Black woman and the concerns she raised around diversity as being the main driver for both the firing and the way it was done and the speed,” Ozoma said.

Google CEO Pichai wrote to staff that he is aware the episode has “seeded doubts and led some in our community to question their place at Google.” He apologized for that. And committed to fix it.

Google declined to be interviewed for this story. It points to emails in which executives say they vigorously support free thinking and independent research.

But now even that is up for debate. Before she left Google, the company abruptly asked Gebru to retract a research paper critical of Google’s technology.

Linguist Emily Bender at the University of Washington, who was one of her co-authors, said she feels for researchers inside Google right now.

“I can’t imagine that it wouldn’t have a chilling effect on people who are working there trying to work on this but now looking over their shoulder wondering, ‘When is something all of a sudden going to be retracted?’ and their work going to be basically taken away from them?” Bender said.

After Google demanded that Gebru retract the paper for not meeting the company’s bar for publication, Gebru asked that the process be explained to her, including a list of everyone who was part of the decision. If Google refused, Gebru said she would talk to her manager about “a last date.”

Google took that to mean Gebru offered to resign, and Google leadership say they accepted, but Gebru herself said no such offer was ever extended, only threatened.

Gebru learned that Google had let her go while she was on a vacation road trip across the country.

Former Googler Leslie Miley said he does not believe Google would have handled it the same way if Gebru were a white man.

“You fired a Black woman over her private email while she was on vacation,” Miley said. “This is how tech treats Black women and other underrepresented people.”

At Google, Gebru’s former team laid out in their letter to Pichai what is needed: “swift and structural changes if this work is to continue, and if the legitimacy of the field as a whole is to persevere.”

Source: Ousted Black Google Researcher: ‘They Wanted To Have My Presence, But Not Me Exactly’

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We started the South Asian COVID Task Force because Ontario failed to address inequities. In a short time, we’ve seen more people get tested

2020/12/19 Leave a comment

Good initiative:

Despite the best of intentions, one-size-fits-all public health interventions are ineffective and in fact leave vulnerable communities exposed. To address the spread happening in South Asian communities, like Peel Region in Ontario, the South Asian COVID Task Force has formed as a grassroots initiative to put a spotlight on the specific needs of our communities and the structural barriers in place that are continuing to drive the pandemic.

Now, we’re calling on provincial and local governments to work with us to increase capacity on robust contact tracing, isolation, testing and support for communities that are in need. Time is of the essence.

Yes, the vaccine is here, with the Pfizer vaccine recently being approved for use in Canada, but we are still months away from the vaccine being available to most Ontarians. The early strategy includes giving health-care workers and those living in congregate settings priority, leaving many of the hot spot regions untouched. In addition, introducing the vaccine into areas of uncontrolled outbreak will make it far less effective at preventing death and morbidity.

Unfortunately, despite ample time to prepare and organize, there are countless examples across Canada of reluctance to take urgent action to provide basic public health interventions like contact tracing, mandatory indoor masking, and testing.

Alberta dragged its feet for weeks while its ICUs filled and case positivity soared throughout the entire province. Manitoba has imposed strict restrictions for the holidays, but not before the deaths of 176 residents and more than 1,400 casesplagued its personal care homes and assisted living centres. In Ontario, community spread runs rampant in some racialized communities where testing access has been especially limited.

In a period of just three weeks, the South Asian COVID Task Force has mobilized and grown into an organization that identifies community needs, creates (and disseminates) culturally appropriate educational materials, and advocates for what South Asian communities need on the ground to curb the spread. We serve to shine a light on inequities that might not be obvious in a top-down structure and to build trust with South Asian communities.

Organizations like ours need to exist because public health authorities can only address what they see. Especially since up until recently, Public Health of Ontario was not collecting any COVID-19 race-based data. If you don’t see the problem, you can’t address the problem.

In our short existence, we have aggressively promoted community testing, created social media posts in various South Asian languages that have gone viral, busted myths that are rampant in our communities, and advocated for the creation of an additional pilot testing site in North East Brampton — where in one neighbourhood last month, nearly one in five COVID-19 tests were positive. That’s five times the provincial average.

And we are not alone in our advocacy. Other culture and faith-based groups are mobilizing on the ground to do the same work we are doing in their communities across the country.

As Adalsteinn Brown, the dean of the Dalla Lana School of Public Health in Toronto, said about the prevention gap last week, there “are long-standing structural factors here … that drive these much higher rates of infection.” While “one-size-fits-all” public health interventions are unlikely to help, tailored community action can show some much needed success.

Rightly so, we’ve been called upon to help address the disproportionate impact COVID has had on South Asians. As physicians, health-care workers, business owners and community members, we are working tirelessly off the corners of our desks to make a difference because we know time means lives. We’ve created distribution channels, built trust and identified areas of great need.

But critical to the success of a community, grassroots organization like the South Asian COVID Task Force is the willingness of local authorities to listen and act quickly when we ring the alarm.

One critical example of this is creating testing capacity in Peel Region. Our media push for South Asians to get tested in Brampton has worked, but we’ve created demand that’s outpaced current infrastructure. It takes up to seven days to get an appointment now, with minimal walk-in availability. Multi-generational home dwellers still can’t easily isolate for that long. And the financial pressures to go to work in spite of illness remains a nagging threat to many families.

A great case in point of how things can work collaboratively is with the local health authorities in Peel, who are working with us to increase testing capabilities. Regardless of the lockdown, without more testing capacity, surveillance measures are inadequate. Specifically, we are working together to: extend the hours of existing community sites, acknowledge the barriers of online booking and allow for walk-in appointments to occur, and add staffing who can speak in locally prevalent languages — like Punjabi.

Similarly with vaccine rollout, we have been anticipating the potential challenges in our communities: vaccine hesitancy, religious issues with receiving certain vaccines, prioritizing elderly living in multi-generational homes, and identifying barriers in language and accessibility. Whether it’s building a ride-share program, staffing mobile health units or translating resources into multiple languages and disseminating it, we are here to help address these structural barriers.

We can’t do this alone. We, and organizations like ours, need our governments and public health authorities to work with us, and with the same urgency, drive and motivation to provide the lifesaving public health infrastructure and funding we so badly need at this moment in time.

It’s important to remember that, for some communities in need, the time to act aggressively was yesterday. The pandemic is a multi-front battle and we all need to step up and do our part.

Source: We started the South Asian COVID Task Force because Ontario failed to address inequities. In a short time, we’ve seen more people get tested

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RCMP Quietly Releases Race-Based Data Showing Number Of Black Employees

2020/12/19 Leave a comment

Now that this data is available, good to see it becoming requested. One suggestion for requesters, whether parliamentarians, journalists, academics or others: ask for data for all visible minority groups in order to have needed context for each visible minority group, as knowing whether Black public servants are over or under-represented compared to not visible minority can either overstate or understate representation issues:

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) quietly released employment statistics showing 1.5 per cent of regular members in officer roles identify themselves as Black.

The data was disclosed in a document tabled in the House of Commons last week in response to a written question submitted by NDP MP Jack Harris in October.

Harris sits on the House’s public safety committee currently studying systemic racism in policing in Canada. In an order paper question, he asked the RCMP to provide demographic details about employees and asked for statistics about staff who self-identify as Indigenous, Black or “another visible minority.”

According to the document, of the permanent, regular RCMP members, 1.6 per cent described themselves as being of “mixed origin” as of Oct. 27, 2020. Slightly more employees who self-identified as Black hold non-police officer roles.

There are two categories of non-officer roles: civilian members and public service employees. Though both are considered public service workers, the distinction between them is determined by the conditions of their employment.

Civilian members, such as psychologists and 9-1-1 dispatchers, are hired under the RCMP Act, while public service workers are hired under the Public Service Employment Act.

Approximately 19,000 police officers are employed by the RCMP, according to the national police force. As of last year, just over 3,400 people were employed as civilian employees and nearly 7,700 people as public service employees.

Among public service employees, slightly more people (1.8 per cent) identified themselves as Black. One per cent of respondents self-described as “mixed origin.”

Among civilian members, the number is lower. Less than one per cent (0.9 per cent) of civilian members self-identified as Black, and 1.2 per cent as “mixed origin.”

The disaggregated data gives new insight into the RCMP’s demographics.

RCMP Demographics Sessional Paper – December 2020 by HuffPost Canada on Scribd

Source: RCMP Quietly Releases Race-Based Data Showing Number Of Black Employees

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‘Talk is cheap’: How companies can act on diversity targets amid an economic crisis

2020/12/18 Leave a comment

Some reasonable practical suggestions and approaches:

When Jaqui Parchment was climbing Canada’s corporate ladder, she noticed office cliques formed around members of the same hockey team and frequently overheard senior consultants chattering about their next round of golf with important clients.

“It just felt so foreign to me,” said Parchment, who emigrated from Jamaica at the age of 14 and has since become the chief executive at consulting company Mercer Canada.

“I’m sure to most people it would not have felt that way, but there were 100 little things … which combined to say to me, ‘Wow, you’re really different.’

“It didn’t feel great.”

For Parchment and other members of racialized communities, these kinds of incidents — small in themselves, but which add up over time — serve as a constant reminder that corporate Canada is failing to meet the bar on inclusivity.

But 2020 brought a push to improve workplace culture and attract and retain more diverse staff and customers after the death of George Floyd, a Black man who died in U.S. police custody in May.

Seven in 10 corporate leaders said their focus on diversity, equality and inclusion has increased since then, Mercer found in a November study that surveyed leaders from 54 Canadian companies. Some have published specific measures outlining how they plan to do better.

The pledges to change comes as COVID-19 is battering the economy and many companies are struggling to survive, but experts say it’s important to keep the momentum going.

“There is absolutely no shortage of things that companies can be doing,” said Tash Jefferies, the Nova Scotia-bred founder of Diversa, a startup helping people of colour and women pursue careers in the tech sector.

For companies unable to hire right now, Jefferies recommends businesses look to supplier contracts and consider shifting to work with companies that are committed to diverse workforces instead.

If you don’t work with suppliers, you can look at changes to workplace culture, she said.

As Parchment worked her way toward the top job at Mercer in 2018, she remembered the cliques from years earlier and moved to “peel back the onion of belonging” so that no one else would feel the same way.

The team said goodbye to golf tournaments at prestigious Glen Abbey. Jerk chicken, Chinese food and samosas started making the menu at company events and clients were entertained with treats that matched their interests instead of the traditional tickets to the game or round of golf.

At a broader level, Parchment urged hiring managers to consider a wider range of candidates and monitor gaps in raises and bonuses between genders and races.

For companies under a hiring freeze, Jefferies suggested looking at the board as director’s terms end, creating an opportunity to bring on a new member from an under-represented community. It’s also important to think about recruitment long before job postings go public, she said.

“The root issue occurs somewhere earlier in the system and so if I was a company, I’d started looking at all my recruiting practices … and try and create some alliances and relationships with different groups long before I have to start hiring,” added Rajesh Uttamchandani, the chief people officer at the MaRS innovation community in Toronto and a member of the newly formed Coalition of Innovation Leaders Against Racism.

That strategy is already coming to life at Toronto-based digital rewards company Drop Technologies Inc. It crunched its own numbers in June and discovered 44 per cent were white and 56 per cent were “ethnically diverse” but not one employee was Black.

Companies can be hesitant to publicly release such data but Drop felt it was the right thing to do, said Susan Feng, the company’s engineering manager and a member of its diversity, equity and inclusion committee.

“Unless you’re making an enormous effort right from the start, you’re going to be falling behind in some aspect of diversity in your hiring and it’s hard to move past that initial feeling of ‘This doesn’t look very good,'” she said.

“But if we don’t even acknowledge that there’s an issue here, then we’re not going to do anything to make it different.”

Drop worked with staff to find ways to better represent Canada’s population. It settled on ideas that touch every department, including ensuring at least 30 per cent of models used in the company’s emails, social media and advertising are Black, Indigenous or people of colour, hosting internal events on allyship and anti-racism and donating one per cent of the money redeemed on its app each month to Black-centric charities.

Drop’s chief of staff Esther Park said engagement around the changes has been “incredible” and she’s already seen positive discussions come from lunch-and-learns and movie nights. She hopes the efforts will move the needle.

Mercer managed to do just that after it began tracking gender diversity and rolled out other changes.

Women now make up 45 per cent of Mercer’s leadership team and 40 per cent of its partners, with a 50:50 gender ratio at the level just below partner.

Parchment said Mercer is “further behind” on racial diversity, but is working on tracking it this year.

“I’m not going to pretend that we’re perfect. We still have our issues,” she said. “There’s still very few CEOs of the largest corporations in Canada that are women. There’s still not enough board seats held by women.”

More than 200 companies, signed a pledge vowing to create and share strategic inclusion and diversity plans, implement or expand unconscious bias and anti-racism education and work with members of the Black community to increase their representation as part of the newly-formed Black North Initiative.

Signatories include Mercer, Air Canada, Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment, Facebook Canada and Rogers Communications, and make up 30 per cent of the TSX 60.

The pledge was prompted in part by Floyd’s death, which ignited conversations around systemic racism and ways to address it.

Companies across the country released statements at the time vowing to closer examine their own operations, but Jefferies says she’s seen similar promises go unfulfilled before and doesn’t know what to expect at a time when companies are tightening spending during a pandemic.

“Unless you’re willing to take action and make (diversity) a policy within what you’re doing in your company, it’s just lip service because everybody can do that, and talk is cheap,” she said.

This time she hopes things will be different because conversations around diversity haven’t disappeared, and the attention is acting as a layer of accountability.

“Any companies that are showing that they’re not playing ball and they’re not having diversity be one of their key tenets … they’re going to get hit because ultimately the consumers are helping to shape what companies stay around,” Jefferies said.

“The market will dictate who comes out the winners.”

Source: ‘Talk is cheap’: How companies can act on diversity targets amid an economic crisis

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Douglas Todd: B.C. Muslims rattled by confrontational Victoria imam

2020/12/18 2 Comments

Certainly hate speech, and interesting point about the impact of the Harper government’s repeal of provisions allowing citizens to launch civil actions against online hate speech:

A militant imam in Victoria who openly calls Jews, Christians, atheists and free-speech advocates “filthy” and “evil” is causing distress among Canadian Muslims, and there are calls for him to be prosecuted for hate speech.

“Younus Kathrada is not taken seriously in our community. Somebody making those claims is not part of Islam. But I guess there is a fringe element that follows him,” says Haroon Khan, a trustee at Vancouver’s Al-Jamia mosque, which belongs to the B.C. Muslim Association and often holds interfaith events.

Source: Douglas Todd: B.C. Muslims rattled by confrontational Victoria imam

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USA: Sixty-nine percent of undocumented immigrant workers have jobs “essential” to fighting Covid, says study

2020/12/18 Leave a comment

Not surprising:

More than two-thirds of undocumented immigrant workers have frontline jobs considered “essential” to the U.S. fight against Covid-19, according to a new study released Wednesday by pro-immigration reform group FWD.US.

Sixty-nine percent of undocumented immigrant workers have jobs deemed essential by the Department of Homeland Security, according to the study, which is based on the 2019 American Community Survey by the Census Bureau. The study also estimated that nearly one in five essential workers is an immigrant.

By contrast, the Trump administration has argued that protecting American jobs against foreign workers is crucial to fixing the economic harm caused by Covid-19.

In April, Trump signed an executive order temporarily suspending immigration to “ensure that unemployed Americans of all backgrounds will be first in line for jobs as our economy reopens.” In June, Trump extended the order through the end of the year.

Undocumented immigrants make up 11 percent of agriculture workers, 2 percent of healthcare workers and 6 percent of food services and production workers, the study estimated.

Elizabeth Valencia, 54, on Temporary Protected Status that allows some Salvadorans to work and live in the United States, said she was the only geriatric nursing assistant serving 28 Covid-19 positive residents at a nursing home in Maryland earlier this year after an outbreak affected the staff.

Valencia has lived in the U.S. for 20 years and has worked in the nursing home for almost 18 years, starting as cleaning staff before she trained to be a nursing assistant.

Valencia said all of her co-workers on the floor where she cares for dementia patients are immigrants.

“[The residents] cannot survive by themselves,” she said. “They need us.”

The study also found that 70 percent of the immigrants working in essential jobs have lived in the U.S. for more than 10 years and 60 percent speak English.

Nearly one million of the essential workers are “Dreamers” protected by Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), the study found. Although DACA, enacted by former President Barack Obama, won a challenge by the Trump administration in a Supreme Court ruling earlier this year, a new case in Texas could end the policy.

DACA recipient Jonathan Rodas works as an operating room assistant at the Greater Baltimore Medical Center while he is attending nursing school. Rodas and his entire household, including his undocumented stepfather, all tested positive for Covid-19 in July. They have now all fully recovered and no one was hospitalized.

But Rodas said he was especially worried about his stepfather needing to be hospitalized because he, like other undocumented immigrants, does not have health insurance. Rodas is now back to work. He said he is not surprised by the study that found one in five essential workers are immigrants.

“There’s not a lot of people out there who want to do that job because they’re scared of it,” Rodas said, talking about working in a hospital during a pandemic. “I’m scared of it. But I do it for the patient. The passion that I have to help people out.”

Source: Sixty-nine percent of undocumented immigrant workers have jobs “essential” to fighting Covid, says study

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Saudi Arabia Is Scrubbing Hate Speech from School Books. Why That’s a Win for the Trump Administration

2020/12/17 Leave a comment

Reality a bit more nuanced but yes, reflects progress:

Students in Saudi Arabia, like so many around the world, have traded in-person classrooms for logging onto an app during the COVID-19 pandemic. But they’re also experiencing other major shifts in Saudi Arabia’s official, country-wide curriculum, with new reforms stripping out lessons of hatred toward the “other” – whether Christian, Jewish, or gay – and dictats to defend the Islamic faith through violence.

The Kingdom’s latest batch of textbooks has for the first time removed sections calling for non-believers to be punished by death, and predicting an apocalyptic final battle in which Muslims will kill all Jews, according to a report released Tuesday by a Jerusalem-based think tank that analyzes global curricula for extremist and intolerant views.

The “trend line is cause for optimism,” says Marcus Sheff, CEO of the nonprofit Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education, or IMPACT SE. “We do see a significant change…a real institutional effort … at the highest levels to make a change to modernize the curriculum to remove offense.”

That said, the books, which are used in the public K-12 curriculum and made freely available throughout the Arab world, still characterize Jews and Christians as “enemies of Islam.” They say that infidels “do not have any good deeds” and will spend eternity in hell, according to the report, made available exclusively to TIME prior to its publication. “No question about it, there is still a way to go,” says Sheff.

It’s a potentially critical change in a country that has been widely criticized for teaching and exporting its strict interpretation of Sunni Islam across the Muslim world. Roughly two-thirds of the Saudi population is under 30, but an old guard of Saudi royals, religious scholars and long-serving government officials remains both powerful and deeply conservative. The curriculum is taught at Saudi Arabia’s some 30,000 schools inside the country, available to all its citizens, as well as at Saudi schools overseas, according to the Saudi embassy in Washington’s website. The free textbooks are also downloaded by teachers throughout the Sunni Muslim world, reaching potentially millions of students every year.

Trump Administration officials say the changes are proof that Saudi Arabia is turning a corner on extremism, thanks in part to their quiet lobbying to put textbook reform near the top of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman’s Vision 2030 plan to modernize the Kingdom. A former senior State Department official says President Donald Trump helped facilitate MBS’s reform drive by paying attention to the Kingdom’s fears of Iran’s regional ambitions. “By countering Iran, and engaging privately with them on human rights issues, we have expanded the space for MBS to modernize the Kingdom, and continue the reforms that he has wanted to make,” the former official says.

A State Department official tells TIME that the Trump Administration is “encouraged by the report that finds positive changes in influential textbooks used throughout Saudi Arabia,” adding that the Administration supports “textbooks free of intolerance and violence” and is also backing the development of a pilot Saudi teacher training program. Both officials spoke anonymously in order to describe sensitive and private conversations with the Saudis.

A Saudi official, asked to comment on the broad outlines of the IMPACT-SE report, tells TIME that “education reform is an ongoing process that will continue into the foreseeable future,” as part of Vision 2030, with the “development of more effective teachers and students … as one of its primary goals.” The official spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the controversial subject.

Fahad Nazer, spokesman for the Saudi embassy in Washington, told a virtual audience in November that Saudi education officials have found “some material that was deemed objectionable … offensive” in the Kingdom’s textbooks, and made “a very concerted effort to remove all of it from the entire curriculum,” and replace “this offensive material with lessons that promote moderation, toleration and peaceful coexistence.” The IMPACT-SE report did not find new material had been added for the deleted sections in the latest revisions, however.

This is the second major revision of the nation’s textbooks during the Trump Administration. Last year’s version dropped many of the worst racist and anti-Semitic references but was still “suffused with extremism,” Sheff says, spreading the kind of hateful ideology that has fueled attacks on westerners from 9/11 to the 2019 shooting of U.S. personnel at Naval Air Station Pensacola by Saudi Second Lt. Mohammed Saeed Alshamrani, an officer of the Royal Saudi Air Force, who killed three Navy Airmen. Alshamrani, who was 21 when he carried out the attacks, would have studied the earlier, more extreme, unaltered version of the texts, in which Sheff says “the West was blamed for for every conceivable evil.”

One of the report’s peer reviewers, David Weinberg, Washington Director for International Affairs at the Anti-Defamation League, says “some of the most intolerant parts of the curriculum have now been removed, which is truly remarkable,” including the removal of passages calling for the death penalty for adultery, acts of homosexuality and perceived acts of magic. But he agrees problematic passages remain, including references to Jews who commit wrongdoing being turned into “real monkeys,” and passages that “encourage enmity and demonization toward infidels and polytheists,” a blanket term used for Jews, Christians, Shi’ite Muslims and other perceived nonbelievers, Weinberg says. “They’re not there yet.”

Ali Shihabi, a Saudi author and political analyst based in New York and Europe, says curricula reform in Saudi Arabia has been underway since 9/11, and “accelerated” under MBS, but that the effort has been “resisted by a ‘conservative deep state’” in the Saudi education ministry. “The process has been one of two steps forward, and one back, but forward nonetheless,” he says.

MBS has made landmark social reforms since taking power in 2017, advancing women’s rights in particular by allowing them to drive, get a passport and travel abroad without the permission of a male guardian. But for watchdog groups like Human Rights Watch, those reforms don’t offset acatalog of human rights abuses, including the military campaign against Houthis in Yemen that has killed scores of civilians, the jailing of women’s rights activists, and the killing of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who was dismembered and disappeared by Saudi officials at their consulate in Istanbul.

MBS had initially been feted as an agent of change, named one of TIME’s most influential people in April 2018. But Khashoggi’s brutal killing in October of that year drew widespread international condemnation and raised fundamental questions over the young Crown Prince’s commitment to basic human rights. MBS has denied knowledge of the plot, and in September, the Kingdom sentenced eight people to long prison terms for taking part in the brutal extrajudicial killing.

President-elect Joe Biden has vowed to “reassess” the U.S. relationship with Saudi Arabia, giving priority to “democratic values and human rights.” In a statement on the two-year anniversary of Khashoggi’s death, Biden said, “Saudi operatives, reportedly acting at the direction of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, murdered and dismembered” him, adding that the Saudi journalist and his loved ones still “deserve accountability.”

‘Words and deeds have to match.’

The MBS-blessed reforms to the 2020 textbooks include removing most references to Jihad, broadly defined as the fight against enemies of Islam and interpreted differently across the Muslim world. The previous version included an example that declared violent Jihad as the pinnacle of Islamic teaching. Just a decade ago, Sheff says, the curriculum centered around preparing students for Jihad and martyrdom.

The texts no longer include the anti-Semitic trope that “Zionist Forces” run the world and are plotting to expand Israel’s territory from the Nile to the Euphrates, according to the IMPACT-SE report. And for the first time, a key Saudi religious teaching has been deleted that describes an end-of-days battle between Muslims and Jews in which all the Jews would be killed.

Ali Al-Ahmed, a critic of the Saudi government from the Washington, D.C.-based Institute for Gulf Studies, confirms the latest textbook editions no longer include references to this final battle, also called the fifth sign of Armageddon – which he said included the Jews being “annihilated” – nor the sections saying that apostasy, adultery and homosexuality are punishable by death. A chapter concerning Jihad was also removed, says Al-Ahmed, who has done his own independent review of Saudi textbooks. “The fact that the Trump Administration is in power made it easier, because they have a stronger relationship,” Al-Ahmed says. “I give them credit for it.”

But, he and others caution, simply removing the references is not enough. “If you don’t talk about Jihad, you leave it for others to interpret. You need to talk about it the right way,” and replace the hateful material with “more proactive instructions on how to deal with other faiths.” He points out that Saudi scholar Dr. Hassan Farhan al-Maliki is still jailed in Saudi Arabia and facing a possible death sentence for allegedly confessing to the crime of “calling for freedom of belief” and criticizing some of the more extreme practices of Saudi Salafi Wahhabism, the strict sect of Islam upon which Saudi Arabia was founded.

Farah Pandith, author of How We Win on how to defeat extremism, agrees the Kingdom’s “words and deeds have to match.” Pandith was part of efforts to encourage Saudi education reform during the Bush Administration and as the Obama Administration’s first Special Representative to Muslim Communities, after the attacks of 9/11, in which most of the hijackers were Saudi. Pandith says while the latest textbooks have removed “some horrifying things about homosexuality and sorcery” and altered language that called for violence against nonbelievers, the changes need to be matched by steps to counteract the “billions” the Kingdom has spent to export textbooks and clerics steeped in the uncompromising Wahhabi sect’s interpretation of Islam.

“You’ve got to be able to say it is okay for different countries…to have Muslims practice Islam the way they would like to,” Pandith says. The Saudis haven’t added anything to teach “respect for the diversity of Islam,” she says. “By omitting that, they’re already saying their way is the only way.”

Source: Saudi Arabia Is Scrubbing Hate Speech from School Books. Why That’s a Win for the Trump Administration

Filed under Antisemitism, Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

Door to the C-Suite still locked for many diverse candidates amid slow pace of change

2020/12/17 Leave a comment

Good to have this data indicating the need for change:

Nancy Tower knows just how important help from the highest echelons of corporate Canada can be for someone trying to break into the old boys’ club.

She was a promising worker when she started at Halifax-based energy company Emera Inc. in 1997, but said a “gender-blind” CEO gave her some advice that helped her ascend to become the president and chief executive at subsidiary Tampa Electric.

He prodded her to get experience in all areas of the business, making her a more well-rounded executive candidate, even if it was lonely at times.

“I was chief financial officer of Emera for six years and when I would attend conferences, most of the CFOs would be male. I didn’t have a lot of female colleagues,” Tower said. “I think the utility business does tip toward more males in senior positions.”

Despite the #MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements spurring a push for change across corporate Canada, data shows the country’s most powerful companies haven’t made much progress since Tower’s ascent.

Women are still significantly underrepresented at the top ranks of Canada’s most prominent and powerful companies. The figures are even lower for Black and Indigenous women and other marginalized groups.

A study from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives found women accounted for about 10 per cent of named executive officers (NEOs) — a company’s most senior and highly compensated positions — at about 250 businesses in both 2017 and 2018, the most recent years it looked at.

Comparing those numbers to previous years is complicated — a common difficulty when reporting about underrepresented populations because figures haven’t been publicly available until recently and there is no standard methodology due to a wide range of data collection methods.

Still, the 10 per cent figure is in line with a 2018 Canadian Press analysis of TSX60 companies, which found less than eight per cent of the top paid management roles were held by women. For chief executive and chief financial officer, the number of women had actually decreased compared with five years earlier.

“The door to the C-Suite is locked for women. They can’t get in the door … That situation hasn’t changed at all,” said David Macdonald, a senior economist at the CCPA, an independent and non-partisan think tank that researches social, economic and environmental justice issues.

“If they do manage to get in the door somehow, then they will get paid less no matter what job they take.”

In each of the two years examined in the CCPA study, female named officers on average made 69 cents for every dollar made by their male counterparts. That represented an average pay gap of at least $900,000.

The situation can be even more bleak for people who are Indigenous, racialized or have disabilities. Studies say women from these groups are even less likely to be given top roles or paid as much as their male or white counterparts.

Osler, Hoskin and Harcourt LLP research from 2020 showed 32 per cent of companies had at least one executive officer who identifies as a visible minority. Out of the 205 companies that disclosed data, just two had at least one executive officer who is Indigenous and five had people with disabilities in top positions.

“When women make gains, it is not all women,” said Sen. Ratna Omidvar. “I’ve been told the rising tide lifts all boats, but that is not what I see.”

Omidvar pushed for amendments in 2018 to the Canada Business Corporations Act that would have required publicly traded companies to disclose the number of women and people from “equity-seeking groups” on their boards and in senior management.

Governance and diversity advocates supported similar measures as a way to encourage progress at a faster pace.

In 2015, the Ontario Securities Commission introduced a “comply-or-explain” requirement for TSX-listed companies to disclose annually how many women are on their board and in executive officer positions, and whether there are targets in place. If a company does not have a policy, it must explain why.

Since then, the share of board seats held by women has increased to 17 per cent from 11 per cent and there has been a decline in the share of boards with no women. Even so, almost half  — 46 per cent — of companies still do not have any women in executive officer positions, according to the latest numbers from the OSC.

The Nasdaq stock exchange earlier this month filed a proposal with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for a comply-or-explain regulation that would require most listed companies to have at least two diverse directors or explain why they cannot meet the mandate.

Yet the proposed changes to Canadian law failed because critics argued businesses shouldn’t be overregulated, Omidvar said.

“I was actually completely shattered, but this is politics,” she said.

If the vote was held again, she is confident it would tilt in her favour. Not only are similar measures gaining traction, the country reached a “tipping point” after the May death of George Floyd, a Black man who died in U.S. police custody.

Floyd’s death resulted in mass protests across the U.S. and Canada and prompted business leaders to pledge to do more to help underrepresented groups.

Manon Brouillette, the former chief executive and president of Quebecor Inc. subsidiary Videotron, said impostor syndrome — where people feel like they are inexperienced or don’t belong in some jobs — plays a big role too.

“When I joined Videotron in 2004, I was the only executive woman at the table, but my (bigger) fear was that I was 10 years younger than other guys,” said Brouillette, who spent almost 15 years at the company and now serves on boards for companies including the National Bank of Canada.

“A lot of women really want to be experts in something before doing it.” Luckily for her, she said, “I’m not scared of failure, so I take more risk.”

Brouillette prods other women to push for a higher salary or apply for new roles without feeling they must meet all the criteria.

Tower, who plans to retire next year, does the same thing, encouraging other women to replicate her methods and fight for equal compensation.

But companies aren’t off the hook either. Brouillette recommends leaders avoid trying to appear “superhuman” and instead make workers feel they can reach out with any issue. Even something as simple as calling executives by their first name rather than a formal title can create positive change, Brouillette said.

“You have more balanced executive teams and the power is more shared in our economy now than 20 years ago, but still, the CEO sets the tone in the business, so it will all reflect on how women grow in that business.”

Source: Door to the C-Suite still locked for many diverse candidates amid slow pace of change

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New Brunswick: Some immigrants should get to vote in civic elections, group says

2020/12/17 2 Comments

Personally, question how urgent a need this is when the path to Canadian citizenship is relatively easy and straightforward, one that will become more affordable when the government implements its election commitment to waive fees (or even if it does so partially):

A growing chorus of New Brunswickers is calling for giving some voting rights to immigrants who have obtained permanent resident status.

The New Brunswick Multicultural Council is leading the campaign to allow permanent residents to vote in municipal elections.

Moncef Lakouas, the council’s president, said he’s talked to municipal leaders and to many other citizens across the province and has found enthusiasm for the change.

“It’s not just permanent residents calling for this,” said Lakouas. “Many New Brunswickers, including elected officials, are saying, let’s do this.”

Permanent residents have many of the responsibilities and rights citizens enjoy, such as paying taxes and access to some social programs, but voting rights are not extended until citizenship is obtained.

Som Somaditya Das, a permanent resident living in Saint John, said permanent residents contribute so much to their communities, it only makes sense to extend voting rights.

“We are living here,” said Das.

“We are paying taxes. We are contributing to the growth and development of the economy of this region. We are contributing to the cultural landscape, to the social landscape. But we do not have any avenue so that our voice is heard, at least politically.”

But Lakouas said permanent residents can begin to contribute to the community politically before citizenship.

The council is focusing on an extension of voting rights in local elections, rather than provincial or federal ones, because of how direct the involvement of municipal governments are in newcomers’ lives.

Das said allowing permanent residents to vote could help increase diversity in municipal governments.

“We have different perspectives of people coming from different parts of the world,” said Das.

“They are different in their cultural background in their ethnic background. So we may not recognize their needs or the necessities in their lives unless we have a diverse representation in the government.”

The ball is now in the province’s court, as municipalities fall under provincial jurisdiction, so any change to voting rights would have to come from the province.

CBC News has reached out to the Department of Local Government and Local Governance Reform but has not heard back.

Lakouas said this is an opportunity for the province to lead the way.

“This is something that has not happened in Canada,” said Lakouas.

“We could lead first on it. We don’t have to wait for somebody else to do it and then learn from the process. We can lead the way and lead also all the marketing and the economic benefits that will come from it.”

Source: Some immigrants should get to vote in civic elections, group says

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