Article content continued

Yes to both questions, she said, “and when I asked how this could have happened the answer was: because you’re a woman.”

Duncan, a medical geographer, has taught at the University of Windsor and University of Toronto. She didn’t mention either by name Thursday.

Women in research institutions across Canada still tell her similar stories today, she said.

“I don’t expect to hear in 2016: ‘I hid my pregnancy for seven months by wearing larger lab coats. I came back to work 48 hours after giving birth because of fear.'” But she said these are real complaints.

The banquet room was hushed as she talked.

“What we have heard as we go across the country is that those challenges still exist,” she said in an interview after the speech.

“One of them is if you have a lab and you have a child or several children, and you’re out (on maternity leave) and you come back, who looks after the lab? Who builds your research team? … Women can really lose there.

“I spent 25 years of my life fighting so that young women wouldn’t face the challenges I did.”

She said women in science face consistent problems across Canada: “lack of mentors, lack of role models … lack of women in senior leadership positions.

“We cannot afford to lose our talent. Science needs women, science needs diversity and science needs to reflect Canada.

“We’ve got to not only attract women and indigenous groups and other under-represented groups; we’ve got to retain them,” she said. But so far, “we are not retaining.”

Duncan said she’s hearing voices in favour of change at universities, “and it’s the men as well saying, ‘You’ve got to take action on this.’ This is a longstanding problem.”

She singled out Nobel Prize winner Art McDonald at Queen’s University, and Neil Turok of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, as “real champions for women in science.”

Duncan said she has been out of academic life since 2008 when she was elected to Parliament, but the problem hasn’t gone away in that time.

tspears@postmedia.com

twitter.com/TomSpears1