Women academics are still outnumbered at the higher ranks

If you enter almost any university department in Canada, you'll see that the majority of students are women. This especially applies to disciplines such as social work, education, speech therapy, psychology or medicine. With the exception of pure and applied sciences (where 43 percent of students are women) and engineering (where 20 percent of students are women), 60 percent of university graduates in Canada are women.

However, they have a smaller majority at the post-graduate level, representing 54.4 percent of master's students and 47.8 percent of PhD candidates. Among women in the professional academic community, 48 percent are assistant professors, 41 percent are associate professors and 26 percent are tenured professors.

Experts use the "leaky pipeline" metaphor to refer to this attrition phenomenon. "The more advanced the academic careers and the higher the level of education needed to get there, the more women we lose," says Vincent Larivière, associate professor at Université de Montréal and Canada Research Chair in the transformations of scholarly communication. "The problem isn't necessarily convincing women to get into the sciences, it's convincing them to stay," explains Paula Rochon, geriatrician and senior researcher at the Women's College Research Institute in Toronto.

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