Feridun Hamdullahpur, president and vice-chancellor of the University of Waterloo, was at the United Nations with nine other university presidents to unveil the first-ever HeForShe IMPACT 10x10x10 University Parity Report (PDF).
The report highlights the participating universities’ successes and ambitions for gender equity on their campuses.
“I am proud that Waterloo is taking the lead for Canada’s university sector in the global HeForShe effort,” said Hamdullahpur. “We need to promote the message that women equally belong in and excel in STEM. We need to deliberately create clear paths for women to pursue studies in fields like computer science, engineering and math so we can overcome social barriers that have no place in an innovation university in the 21st century.”
In May 2015, the University of Waterloo made three commitments to address gender equity as part of the HeForShe IMPACT 10x10x10 initiative. Over the past 16 months, the University has taken a number of actions including the following highlights:
- The University of Waterloo HeForShe IMPACT Scholarship, now in its second year, will award 24 outstanding female students a total of $288,000 over the five years as a part of ongoing efforts to achieve transformative and enduring gender equality
- The appointment of six professors as Faculty advocates for HeForShe IMPACT initiatives
- Established a research grant, providing $80,000 a year for the next five years to support research and scholarship focused on gender equity
- Financial support for outreach to girls in middle school and for girls in indigenous populations
- A review of all faculty hiring recruitment and selection processes to identify support required to enhance the representation of women in faculty
- Established plans to host the first-annual graduate and post-doctoral conference for women in STEM from May 11 to 12, 2017 and a steering committee to build networking opportunities for new graduates
- A writing contest where through poetry, fiction and creative non-fiction, writers reflect on what a gender equitable campus would look like; selected submissions will be included in a special University of Waterloo anthology to be published on March 8, 2017 – International Women’s Day
Anya Forestell, a student in the Department of Physics and Astronomy in Waterloo's Faculty of Science, and one of the first recipients of a Waterloo HeForShe scholarship, will be speaking at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City the evening of September 20. Forestell will share her experience of being a woman in STEM at the second anniversary celebration of the UN Women’s HeForShe movement for gender equity.
The HeForShe 10 IMPACT universities span across eight countries on five continents:
Georgetown University, USA; Institut d’études politiques de Paris (Sciences Po), France; Nagoya University, Japan; Stony Brook University, USA; the University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong; the University of Leicester, UK; University of Oxford, UK; the University of São Paulo, Brazil; the University of Waterloo, Canada; and the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa.
