December 6th

(I started this entry last December yet somehow neglected to publish it in time.)

Every December 6th, I reflect on the 1989 massacre at Montreal’s Ecole Polytechnique, where young women were hunted and murdered for daring to pursue careers in science and engineering.

For the first half of my life, spent in Montreal, I was too young and immature to grasp the inhumanity that had occurred a mere nine months before I arrived in Canada. In high school, I would casually walk by the memorial on Queen-Mary Road on my way to my orthodontist. I would bow my head during moments of silence to remember the victims, as I would for any other tragic event. In CEGEP, I would don a white ribbon in December with the same abstract sense of duty as I did with the poppy in the month before.

It was only in undergrad that the Montreal Massacre took on a personal dimension. (Foolishly, I had ignored one glaring connection: my mother moved to Montreal in the fall of 1989 to begin graduate studies in Math and Stats, at a different university.) During the summer of my first year at McGill, I worked on a project that required the microfabrication facility at the University of Montreal. As I embarked on my own career in science, it hadn’t occurred to me that someone could be offended, aggrieved, angered by my personal choice until I stepped into l’Ecole Polytechnique. And I was reminded of the sacrifices and hard work of previous generations of women every time I crossed to the other side of Mount-Royal and walked up the campus to work on my samples*.

Inequality, sexism, bias, both explicit and implicit, persist in science and academia. But I am encouraged by the commitment to EDI (equity, diversity, and inclusivity) in recent years by individuals, universities, and granting agencies in Canada, and I hope that their rhetoric, policies, and directives will lead to truly transformative action. Certainly, I will continue to endeavour to honour the women who died on December 6th, 1989, through my own work.

*I was using the focussed-ion beam machine to fabricate antenna probes for a scanning near-field optical microscope to study biological processes.