Description

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Unique in both scope and perspective, Calling for Change investigates the status of women within the Canadian legal profession ten years after the first national report on the subject was published by the Canadian Bar Association.

Elizabeth Sheehy and Sheila McIntyre bring together essays that investigate a wide range of topics, from the status of women in law schools, the practising bar, and on the bench, to women's grassroots engagement with law and with female lawyers from the frontlines. Contributors not only reflect critically on the gains, losses, and barriers to change of the past decade, but also provide blueprints for political action. Academics, community activists, practitioners, law students, women litigants, and law society benchers and staff explore how egalitarian change is occurring and/or being impeded in their particular contexts.

Each of these unique voices offers lessons from their individual, collective, and institutional efforts to confront and counter the interrelated forms of systemic inequality that compromise women's access to education and employment equity within legal institutions and, ultimately, to equal justice in Canada.

Published in English.

About the Author

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For the past 25 years, Sheila McIntyre has been a feminist legal activist working for egalitarian change within Canadian educational and legal institutions. Among the education and employment equity initiatives she has helped secure are anti- harassment policies and procedures, pay equity for women staff, improved disability access, anti-discrimination protection for queer students, staff and faculty, an inclusive law school curriculum and greater diversity among faculty. She also helped found and actively participated in the Women's Studies program at Queen's University. As a lawyer, she has been extensively involved pro bono in test case equality litigation, principally with the Women's Legal Education and Action Fund (LEAF). Throughout the 1990s, she participated with national coalitions of women's organizations to achieve three major equality-driven amendments to criminal sexual offence laws. From 2003-2005, she was Director of the Human Rights Research and Education Centre at the University of Ottawa.