As a UW grad myself, I find myself wishing u/version_five would have posted a top-level comment providing the context of why they feel this is an interesting th

As a UW grad myself, I find myself wishing u/version_five would have posted a top-level comment providing the context of why they feel this is an interesting thing to share to HN. I suspect that might have helped set the tone for a more useful discussion. Three people elsewhere in this thread have commented: (1) wondering if "there is a website that tracks these things" (2) asking whether or not this contravenes the Candian Human Rights Act (3) wondering why Waterloo is being singled out I don't know much about these topics. Handily, though, the job posting itself seems to address the spirit of these questions by: (1) citing multiple studies over a period of several years showing that women are under-represented in full-time faculty positions generally and Canada Research Chairs specifically (2) citing the Ontario Human Rights Commission which permits government programs (for example, the Canada Research Chair program), to be discriminatory if they attempt to ameliorate or remediate discrimination elsewhere (3) citing UW's 2020-2025 strategic plan that identifies UW in particular as under-representing women on faculty. For additional context, UW's IAP [1] system shows that as of 2019, Waterloo ranked at the very bottom of the U15 Group of Canadian Research Universities for percentage of full-time, regular, faculty members who identify as female. I don't know how the Faculty of Environment compares to the broader university. I can understand people not liking affirmative action. But... the questions that were posed thus far in the comments _were_ actually addressed in the job posting, at least, in spirit. [1]: https://uwaterloo.ca/institutional-analysis-planning/university-data-and-statistics/faculty-data/faculty-gender https://uwaterloo.ca/institutional-analysis-planning/univers...