Equity and Diversity

The world has seen irrefutable and repugnant acts of violence and police brutality against black, indigenous and racialized communities indicative of systematic institutionalized racism. Unfortunately, such acts of discrimination and violence continue to occur in our own Canadian cities.

Your CATS Executive wanted to reach out to you, our membership, to condemn such actions, and stand in solidarity with all Black, Indigenous and People of Colour. We call on us all, collectively and individually, to be overtly anti-racist to confront and eradicate racism in all its forms, support the reduction of egregious harmful social inequity especially when associated with race, and fully embrace cultural and ethnic diversity for the beautiful gift that it is.

Although our organization has informally made efforts in this direction, we propose a more formal overt institutionalization of commitment to equity and diversity within our CATS organization, and will work to make it happen. We will report back to our membership soon regarding specifics. Please feel free to contact us with your thoughts and suggestions.

Your CATS Executive Committee, Andrew Seely, Gail Darling, John Dickie, Sean Grondin, James Villeneuve, Shona Smith, Najib Safieddine, Basil Nasir, Jonathan Spicer, Simon Turner, Christian Finley, Biniam Kidane, Colin Schieman

As part of the CATS commitment, the CATS Eecutive has approved the formation of a Task Force on Equity and Diversity and invites participation from all CATS members. The following including the Harvard Implicit Bias test are recommended for further reading:

• Toward the Science and Practice of Anti-Racism: Launching a National Campaign Against Racism
• Hidden in Plain Sight — Reconsidering the Use of Race Correction in Clinical Algorithms
• Harvard Implicit Bias test:  https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatest.html

This document is intended to serve as a resource to white people and parents to deepen our anti-racism work. If you haven’t engaged in anti-racism work in the past, start now. Feel free to circulate this document on social media and with your friends, family, and colleagues.

• Anti-Racism Resources

To take immediate action to Fight for Breonna Taylor, please visit FightForBreonna.org.

The following includes a variety of resources including a talk, a commentary, and social media about inequality from the academic perspective.

• A comprehensive presentation by Dr. Onye Nnorom entitled Medicine, Inequities and Black Lives. This talk was given to the uOttawa Faculty of Medicine.  https://uottawacpd.eventsair.com/QuickEventWebsitePortal/edio-webinar/infosite
• A powerful commentary by Zahra Clayborn, a doctoral student at the uOttawa School of Epidemiology and Public Health. Zahra’s experiences and words will hit hard. It is a call to correct the wrongs. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/diversity-epidemiology-phd-pov-1.5633474
• A twitter thread by Holly Witteman that provides sound practical advice on what we can do to build a level playing field in academia. Holly is a Visiting Scientist with the OHRI’s Centre for Implementation Research. Thanks to Jeremy Grimshaw for bringing this forward.  https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1285801718219968512.html

CATS has taken a thorough review of its history of representation. It looks forward to sharing the results at an upcoming meeting. This honest look at CATS past and present is a necessary step to guiding the future of CATS.

• Annals Bias Mitigation in Recruitment
• Annals Gender Representation in STSA
• Annals Representation in STS
• JTCVS Gender Representation

Unfortunately, the challenges of diversity, equity, and inclusion continue. A 12-year review of URiMs with academic appointments at U.S. medical schools found both women and racial minorities were represented at lower rates than their proportion in the general population. 4 This disparity was most apparent at the highest levels of academic rank, including professor, chair, and dean positions …

• Shoring up the pipeline
• bulletin.facs.org

On this International Women’s Day, we celebrate Women Leaders around the world and here at home. We welcome the opportunity to work alongside our male colleagues as equal partners contributing to the care of our patients and the growth of our specialty. We look forward to the time when  people of all cultures, race, religion, and sexual orientation can work alongside us with equal opportunities and without prejudice.

Together we are better!

*”The Women are Coming is an inspiring video featuring women leaders across the world. Credit to the owner – WWLI. 

Click below to see some of the many outstanding women worldwide that we celebrate: