I have spent the past 4 days with hundreds of Schulich MBA students. A colleague of mine was running the team building program for them, and I was in charge of the diversity session.
It was a great experience, and I couldn’t help but notice the diversity (or in some cases, lack thereof) within the over 400 students (full and part time) that came through over the four days:
– culturally, the majority of students were of South Asian origin, followed by Asian
– about 80% of the students were male
– there was no one with a physical disability (that was evident, anyway)
– racially, the majority of the students were Brown (various shades of “people of colour”), followed by White and then Black
And here is where the numbers stood out the most for me. In a sea of different skin colours, the number of Black students was so low that I think I can actually remember the faces of each one. I think the final number was 9 (5 Black women and 4 Black men). That’s about 2%.
Yikes!
It reminds me of town hall meetings about high secondary school drop out rates (also known as “push out” rates) for kids of colour in Toronto. But not all of the Black students were local, or even Canadian…
Things that make you go “hmm….”
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copyright 2011 Annemarie Shrouder
author, speaker & facilitator on issues of diversity & inclusion
www. beeing.ca
Just wondering what these numbers would have been ten years ago, or twenty years ago, just to view trends.
Just wondering how these numbers relate to the population at large.