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Diane Deans has a list of unfair things city hall either did or tried to do, halted only because of a woman’s perspective.
The Gloucester-Southgate councillor wants city hall to have a small “women’s bureau” to weigh in on how city council decisions might affect women differently from men, and a councillor designated to deal with women’s issues. Or, to be exact about it, she wants city council to take a close look at these ideas when it’s setting up after the election due this fall.
These are trifling expenses that could do a lot of good, and Deans deserves better than the brushoff Mayor Jim Watson gave her when she raised the ideas at last Wednesday’s city council meeting.
“I’m not interested in creating a big bureaucracy. I’d rather see dollars go into resolving issues of gender equality,” the mayor said at the time. It’s the kind of dismissive line he uses regularly on ideas that come from somebody else. He can be better. His government can be better.
The example Deans talked about when she presented her motion at Wednesday’s council meeting was from Stockholm, Sweden, where a look at how residents got around the city in winter revealed that men were more apt to drive and women were more apt to walk or bike. Focusing snowplowing on auto routes, as it always had, wasn’t sexist in intent but had sexist results, Stockholm decided, and changed its priorities.
Deans has cases from here at home, too.
“The very first one was back in the 1990s when I was a much younger councillor,” she said. At the time, although women were eligible to be firefighters, there were none serving. “The way that we did it at the time is you would have to go through all the training and all of the hurdles, and you would get a pass-fail. When we were hiring, though, we would call people based on rank.”
Women could meet the standards — even be gifted leaders, communicators and problem-solvers — but they’d never be called for interviews because men would place ahead of them in physical tests.
“They realized that the tests had a bias in them, built into them, toward men,” Deans said. She and former councillor Elisabeth Arnold got the city to reconsider its approach. Ottawa hired its first three female firefighters in 1999. One was a Pan-Am Games medallist, another a competitive triathlete. All are still on the job. Now the fire department aggressively recruits women.
Firefighter Dana Best helps Savanna Cleveland with her harness at the week-long Camp FFIT at the Ottawa Fire Services Training Centre. The summer program is one way the Ottawa fire department recruits young women interested in firefighting careers.
“It’s a long way from equal, and that’s fine, but at least the barrier in the system against women, toward men, has been removed,” Deans said.
During her stint as chair of the city’s transit commission, OC Transpo adopted a policy letting riders ask to be let off buses between stops after 7 p.m., to shorten their walks in the dark. The idea had been proposed in a roundtable with women’s groups, talking about how the transit system does and doesn’t work for them.
“That came out of a gender lens (but) it’s not just for women, it helps everybody,” Deans said.
Most recently, an early draft of the city budget proposed to deal with the provincial hike to the minimum wage by sharply increasing the prices of recreation programs, which have a lot of minimum-wage staff. Deans saw this as the current chair of city council’s community-services committee.
The city wanted to deal with Ontario’s minimum-wage hike by increasing prices at its recreation centres, Diane Deans says, a move she quashed because the load would land disproportionately on families.
“You never saw this because it never actually saw the light of day, but the recommendation was to increase all of our program fees four to six per cent all across the board. I said, ‘I feel that that is putting more of the burden on families and children, and I don’t think that is where I would want to do it. I would rather have it across the tax base rather than increase fees in a way that creates barriers,’ ” Deans said.
Reports to council committees already include mandatory sections on how decisions are expected to affect rural Ottawa and people with disabilities, alongside their financial implications. Sometimes there’s no special consequence to worry about, but at least somebody has to have thought about it. The city government is, well, a government, but it’s also a massive provider of services in fields where it has few or no competitors. It doesn’t get the same financial cues businesses do when it falls short.
Our city council is 17-per-cent female, drawn from a citywide pool of candidates in the 2014 who were 19-per-cent female. Ottawa hasn’t had a serious female candidate for mayor in 18 years — since the amalgamation election, which Gloucester mayor Claudette Cain lost to Bob Chiarelli. For comparison: the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board has nine women and four men, and its Catholic counterpart has an equal split of five each. Both are chaired by women.
In contrast, the city says 46.1 per cent of all its employees are women, a very close match to their representation in the local workforce. Forty-one per cent of its managers are women.
“It’s maybe a little higher than I expect, but I don’t know what level of management we’re talking about,” Deans said. “I know when I’m looking out from my spot at the council table, I’m looking out at a lot of men.”
Indeed, six of the city’s nine seniormost managers are men. According to the city’s annual salary disclosures, 17 of its top 20 best-paid employees in 2016 were men, up from 16 the year before and 14 the year before that. Most of the women at the top of the salary list tend to be doctors in the public-health unit, who have important jobs but aren’t part of the core city administration in the same way as, say, the general manager of public works.
Deans pointed out that city council had its whole finance committee act as the hiring panel when it needed to choose a new city manager. Deans was on it, and so was Barrhaven Coun. Jan Harder — along with nine men. A female candidate later told Deans “she walked in and saw the panel and she just about threw up,” Deans said.
Just this week, city council hired a person to be a sort of technical overseer for the new light-rail system. The recommendation came from a hiring panel of the mayor, two deputy mayors, and the chairs of city council’s transportation committee and transit commission. All men.
“My focus is not on the affirmative-action part, it’s on the gender-lens part,” Deans said.
Deans hasn’t yet lobbied her fellow councillors, she said. The only backer she knows she has for sure is Somerset Coun. Catherine McKenney.
Getting more women into politics is the work of a generation. Promoting women into top managerial roles — requiring both public-administration skill and subject-matter expertise in, say, engineering — could take longer. Recognizing that we might have blind spots and making an effort to look into them doesn’t have to be that hard.
dreevely@postmedia.com
twitter.com/davidreevely
查看原文...
The Gloucester-Southgate councillor wants city hall to have a small “women’s bureau” to weigh in on how city council decisions might affect women differently from men, and a councillor designated to deal with women’s issues. Or, to be exact about it, she wants city council to take a close look at these ideas when it’s setting up after the election due this fall.
These are trifling expenses that could do a lot of good, and Deans deserves better than the brushoff Mayor Jim Watson gave her when she raised the ideas at last Wednesday’s city council meeting.
“I’m not interested in creating a big bureaucracy. I’d rather see dollars go into resolving issues of gender equality,” the mayor said at the time. It’s the kind of dismissive line he uses regularly on ideas that come from somebody else. He can be better. His government can be better.
The example Deans talked about when she presented her motion at Wednesday’s council meeting was from Stockholm, Sweden, where a look at how residents got around the city in winter revealed that men were more apt to drive and women were more apt to walk or bike. Focusing snowplowing on auto routes, as it always had, wasn’t sexist in intent but had sexist results, Stockholm decided, and changed its priorities.
Deans has cases from here at home, too.
“The very first one was back in the 1990s when I was a much younger councillor,” she said. At the time, although women were eligible to be firefighters, there were none serving. “The way that we did it at the time is you would have to go through all the training and all of the hurdles, and you would get a pass-fail. When we were hiring, though, we would call people based on rank.”
Women could meet the standards — even be gifted leaders, communicators and problem-solvers — but they’d never be called for interviews because men would place ahead of them in physical tests.
“They realized that the tests had a bias in them, built into them, toward men,” Deans said. She and former councillor Elisabeth Arnold got the city to reconsider its approach. Ottawa hired its first three female firefighters in 1999. One was a Pan-Am Games medallist, another a competitive triathlete. All are still on the job. Now the fire department aggressively recruits women.
Firefighter Dana Best helps Savanna Cleveland with her harness at the week-long Camp FFIT at the Ottawa Fire Services Training Centre. The summer program is one way the Ottawa fire department recruits young women interested in firefighting careers.
“It’s a long way from equal, and that’s fine, but at least the barrier in the system against women, toward men, has been removed,” Deans said.
During her stint as chair of the city’s transit commission, OC Transpo adopted a policy letting riders ask to be let off buses between stops after 7 p.m., to shorten their walks in the dark. The idea had been proposed in a roundtable with women’s groups, talking about how the transit system does and doesn’t work for them.
“That came out of a gender lens (but) it’s not just for women, it helps everybody,” Deans said.
Most recently, an early draft of the city budget proposed to deal with the provincial hike to the minimum wage by sharply increasing the prices of recreation programs, which have a lot of minimum-wage staff. Deans saw this as the current chair of city council’s community-services committee.
The city wanted to deal with Ontario’s minimum-wage hike by increasing prices at its recreation centres, Diane Deans says, a move she quashed because the load would land disproportionately on families.
“You never saw this because it never actually saw the light of day, but the recommendation was to increase all of our program fees four to six per cent all across the board. I said, ‘I feel that that is putting more of the burden on families and children, and I don’t think that is where I would want to do it. I would rather have it across the tax base rather than increase fees in a way that creates barriers,’ ” Deans said.
Reports to council committees already include mandatory sections on how decisions are expected to affect rural Ottawa and people with disabilities, alongside their financial implications. Sometimes there’s no special consequence to worry about, but at least somebody has to have thought about it. The city government is, well, a government, but it’s also a massive provider of services in fields where it has few or no competitors. It doesn’t get the same financial cues businesses do when it falls short.
Our city council is 17-per-cent female, drawn from a citywide pool of candidates in the 2014 who were 19-per-cent female. Ottawa hasn’t had a serious female candidate for mayor in 18 years — since the amalgamation election, which Gloucester mayor Claudette Cain lost to Bob Chiarelli. For comparison: the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board has nine women and four men, and its Catholic counterpart has an equal split of five each. Both are chaired by women.
In contrast, the city says 46.1 per cent of all its employees are women, a very close match to their representation in the local workforce. Forty-one per cent of its managers are women.
“It’s maybe a little higher than I expect, but I don’t know what level of management we’re talking about,” Deans said. “I know when I’m looking out from my spot at the council table, I’m looking out at a lot of men.”
Indeed, six of the city’s nine seniormost managers are men. According to the city’s annual salary disclosures, 17 of its top 20 best-paid employees in 2016 were men, up from 16 the year before and 14 the year before that. Most of the women at the top of the salary list tend to be doctors in the public-health unit, who have important jobs but aren’t part of the core city administration in the same way as, say, the general manager of public works.
Deans pointed out that city council had its whole finance committee act as the hiring panel when it needed to choose a new city manager. Deans was on it, and so was Barrhaven Coun. Jan Harder — along with nine men. A female candidate later told Deans “she walked in and saw the panel and she just about threw up,” Deans said.
Just this week, city council hired a person to be a sort of technical overseer for the new light-rail system. The recommendation came from a hiring panel of the mayor, two deputy mayors, and the chairs of city council’s transportation committee and transit commission. All men.
“My focus is not on the affirmative-action part, it’s on the gender-lens part,” Deans said.
Deans hasn’t yet lobbied her fellow councillors, she said. The only backer she knows she has for sure is Somerset Coun. Catherine McKenney.
Getting more women into politics is the work of a generation. Promoting women into top managerial roles — requiring both public-administration skill and subject-matter expertise in, say, engineering — could take longer. Recognizing that we might have blind spots and making an effort to look into them doesn’t have to be that hard.
dreevely@postmedia.com
twitter.com/davidreevely
查看原文...
