Canada’s largest university is asking its employees remarkably personal questions — from what race they are and where they come from to whether they’re transgendered — in a bid to make sure certain groups aren’t being left out of jobs and promotions.

In a new survey given this week to all 10,000 employees from professors to secretaries, the University of Toronto goes beyond asking staff if they see themselves as “persons of colour” or “racialized,” to whether they are black, white, Asian, Latin/Hispanic, Middle Eastern or mixed.

And that’s just to start.

The updated Employment Equity Survey then dives to a level believed unmatched on any other Canadian campus: If you answer ‘black,’ are you African, Caribbean, European, North American or South American?

If you said Asian, do you mean East Asian (Chinese, Japanese, Korean), South Asian (Indian, Pakistani, Sri Lankan), Southeast Asian (Malaysian, Filipino, Vietnamese) or Asian Caribbean from, say, Trinidad? Hispanic employees are asked if their heritage is Caribbean, Central American, European or South American.

The questions also offer a sneak peek at what the university’s 85,000 students will be asked this fall on its first student demographic survey.

“Students have made it very clear they don’t see themselves reflected in faculty and staff, so collecting data is part of an overall move to get a better sense of who is under-represented so we can do better outreach and targeted recruitment,” said Angela Hildyard, vice-president of human resources and equity.

Like other organizations that do a certain amount of business with the federal government, U of T has for decades been required to track its employees by gender, disability, whether they’re aboriginal or members of a ‘visible minority.’

“But this language no longer makes sense,” said Hildyard, especially with students. “If you’ve been to one of our convocations lately, you’ll see we’re so diverse, the visible minority would likely be white.” Even changing the category last year to “person of colour or racialized person” shed little light on the true diversity of campus workers.

“If equity and diversity are linked to excellence — and we are the only university in North America to have a statement making it clear we’ll only be excellent with diversity and equity — then we need to collect more information on how different groups are represented on campus.”

Some black faculty members have been vocal about the need to increase their ranks, she said, “but we have no idea how many we have because we don’t have data. This gives us a better sense of who we have here and if they are under-represented, and target candidate pools.”

Moreover, the university will start giving the survey to job applicants as well, so it can track where the gaps begin.

“Black students feel woefully under-represented (among U of T faculty and staff), so this will allow us to actually see the numbers of black applicants in the first place, and are they being shortlisted? Is there some kind of discrimination going on?”

Too, U of T will take the unusual step of removing names from job applicants’ resumés “to see if that enhances certain groups’ possibility of being interviewed. We always want to be sure we hire the best candidate, but is there something happening (that blocks particular groups) like hiring committees having a bias against certain kinds of names?”

Anecdotally, the ranks of professors at Canadian universities “are not very representative of the wider population,” noted David Robinson, executive director of the Canadian Association of University Teachers, “so gathering this kind of information is a positive thing.” It also could help reveal which university departments are less diverse than others, not only with regards to race, but also gender and abilities.

The U of T survey asks about disabilities and sexual orientation, and a new question on gender includes check-boxes for man, woman, two-spirit, “another gender identity” or “trans: a person who identifies with a gender other than the one assigned to them at birth, or differs from stereotypical masculine and feminine norms.”

Said Hildyard: “The data can help us learn who applies, who gets shortlisted, who gets interviewed for jobs, so if we find the candidate pool is not diverse, that’s where we can focus our efforts.”

How universities handle equity issues:

At the University of Toronto, the 2015 equity survey showed about 17 per cent of tenured faculty identified as “people of colour.” This had slipped slightly from the year before, but had climbed from about 14 per cent in 2008.

Women made up some 36 per cent of U of T’s tenured professors in 2015, up from about 33 per cent in 2008.

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Fewer than 1 per cent of tenured professors are of indigenous background, which has remained the same since 2008. Similarly, the percentage of tenured profs with disabilities has remained at about 5 per cent.

Queen’s University is the only Ontario institution to ask undergraduates to self-identify as “racialized” when they apply. It’s part of a bid to recruit students of a more diverse background, and since 2007, there has been a 10 per cent increase in the number of students who identify as “racialized” who have been offered an undergraduate spot. The number who accept has gone up about 8 per cent. A spokesperson said Queen's is planning a regular equity census of the entire student population, to get a more accurate snapshot.