New Canadian Passport Shows Land of Sporty White Guys

The Canadian government has designed new passports, including watermarks showing “iconic images from Canadian History”, according to Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird. What can we learn from these images? That Canada is a land of sporty and occasionally military white guys. Almost no women, people of colour, artists or poets, and Canada’s aboriginal peoples are symbols only, not actual historic or contemporary peoples.

Canadian columnist Heather Mallick puts it best:

“The passport contains 22 visual watermarks portraying the essence, the uniqueness of Harperlandia. There are, by my count, 98 images of males, six of females. There are various landscapes, from the north, the Prairies and Newfoundland, plus Niagara Falls. There are football players and hockey players, a warship, three war memorials, the RCMP and a soldier. But there is no image of Toronto or Vancouver and no aboriginal Canadian. Apparently only one Canadian verging on our lifetime (Terry Fox) has ever distinguished himself.

According to the government, we are white guys, rural, warlike and sporty, but not literate. Our landscapes are bleak, our buildings drab, our statuary undistinguished. These are not propellant images. In most, we are either stationary or plodding.

Worse, not a single Canadian face is shown cracking a smile.

All the historical maps are blank, apparently sans Inuit or First Nations, and there are no modern maps including the border cities we favour.”

This is not a Canada I know, or want to inhabit!

Men reflect on Ruth Barcan Marcus

Disappointing: The latest issue of the journal Theoria: An International Journal for Theory, History and Foundations of Science contains a section in honor of Prof. Ruth Barcan Marcus, with papers by Graeme Forbes, Manuel Pérez Otero, Mark Richard, Ori Simchen and Sam Wilkinson.  The eminent Genoveva Martí is surely correct, in her introduction to the assembled papers, that Marcus herself would undoubtedly have commented on and criticized the contributions.  Yes, such collections are valuable and indicate worthiness of engagement — all the more reason to feature the work of women in the collection.

Women can take matters into our own hands by responding in numbers to the recent announcement of SWIP-Analytic, “inspired by the success of the Ruth Barcan Marcus conference that was held last spring.”

Gender Equity and Harvard Business School

Fascinating reading:

Year after year, women who had arrived with the same test scores and grades as men fell behind. Attracting and retaining female professors was a losing battle; from 2006 to 2007, a third of the female junior faculty left.

And after reading that, see Patricia Marino’s blog post on this article, “Likabilism,” for a feminist reflection!