UBC’s Equity and Inclusion Office (EIO) saw over 1,100 discrimination-related cases this year, an approximately 75 per cent increase from last year, according to this year’s Human Rights Report.
Every year, the UBC Equity and Inclusion Office releases a report summarizing how the office’s human rights portfolio advanced UBC’s Inclusion Action Plan and Discrimination Policy (SC7) over the past year.
The report’s statistics are categorized by protected characteristics including race, ancestry, disability, sex, religion, gender identity and expression and family status.
This year, 31.52 per cent of consultations — interactions between a UBC student and EIO counselor — were based on allegations of race, colour, ancestry and place of origin.
Consultations as a result of physical or mental disability discrimination were the second most frequent this year, at 20.38 per cent of overall consultations, and those related to sex — which is separate from sexual orientation — were third at 19.66 per cent. Other protected characteristics like gender expression, religion or family status were recorded significantly less frequently.
This year’s 1,104 discrimination-related consultations reflects a yearslong increase in the number of cases the EIO’s human rights portfolio takes on each year. Last year, the EIO reported 629 cases, in 2019/20 it reported 457 cases and in 2018/19 297 cases.
“The pandemic [has had a huge influence]. Things like family status … those concerns went way up as soon as we [were] in a situation where people were being asked to work from home [and had] to balance family commitments,” said EIO Human Rights Advisor Jay Aubrey.
“With the return to work, we see a lot of questions around disability and disability accommodation,” they added. “In the summer of 2020, we saw a really huge spike of concerns that were coming forward on the basis of race.”
While undergraduate students dominated the total number of consultations in most categories, graduate students made up a disproportionate number of consultations in relation to the number of individuals in a given cohort.
Aubrey pointed to the close relationship between graduate students and supervisors as a potential factor for their disproportionate representation in the 2021/22 report.
“If you're a graduate student, or graduate supervisor [who] as we know, has so much influence over your career and whether you complete your degree … there's just a lot of potential for that to go awry,” they said.
For Aubrey, the increased number of consultations indicates a general improvement in the student body’s confidence in the EIO’s system and “are reflections of what's happening in society more broadly.”
Aubrey’s main strategy is to address an individual’s personal issue first and, if given consent to, further focus on the broader discrimination issue.
To increase transparency, the report covers a full 12 month period compared to only a 10 month reporting period in past years.
Aubrey hopes to create more effective and clearer communication between students and the EIO’s leadership.
“A lot of that really important information, that's coming from grassroots activism at the university, and [we] really want to be sure it's being amplified and brought up to a level of leadership that can start to action some of those things,” they said.
“I want to honour the work [students are] doing by amplifying those themes [of concern through their consultations] to really try to create a systemic or culture shift more broadly.”
For more information and to get directly in touch with the Equity and Inclusion Office, you can reach out to humanrights@equity.ubc.ca.
— With files from Nathan Bawaan
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