I have spent the bulk of my week at a fantastic academic and policy related conference that brings together scientists and leaders from a wide variety of fields. What’s really been great about this experience is it’s commitment to engaging with a variety of disciplines. We’re not just seeing health scientists, researchers from STEM fields, or social scientists and humanities scholars, but truly a variety of perspectives from across the research spectrum. Another strength of this conference, which I realize now has not been part of my general conference experience is I’ve noticed a real effort to balance gender representation on the panels. Most of the panels I have attended have either had equal numbers of men and women present, or had greater numbers of women and men, reflecting their attendee balance, which identifies as about 60% women.

Perhaps it is because of these strong efforts at diversity of thought and representation, that I’ve suddenly noticed both how far we’ve come in the academic community with respect to representation, and also how far we still need to go. I conducted a little experiment using the conference program. I counted only 29 visible minorities in the presenters list, from a program of 279 total presenters. This is about 10.4 percent of presenters. Looking around the room, I notice an overwhelming number of white/european/anglo-saxon attendees. So perhaps the 10% reflects the population of attendees. But this is a problem for the academic community as well. Visible minorities in Canada make up over 25% of our population. Ideally this would be reflected in our academic community, and in our leadership community, but sadly, we’re not there yet.

And this conference is one of the better ones, reflecting at the very least gender diversity. My attendance here has also led to me reflecting on past conferences, realizing that the lack of diversity is endemic in our academic institutions. My anecdotal experience is reflected by the experiences of many others as well, such as here, here, and here, to name only a few.

We can do better. As thought leaders we must do better. It’s important to recognize how far we’ve come, and equally as important to see that we’re not yet there.