Sandra Bruneau’s discussion in the April Bulletin of Andrew Irvine’s paper on equity and discrimination in university hiring (Dialogue XXXV, 1996) shows a fine capacity for ferreting out what Irvine "assumes," "suggests" and "hints" between the lines. But since one learns from her so little of what Irvine actually wrote on the pages of his study, I feel I should direct the attention of CAUT members to his main arguments. The key methodological claim is that evidence for systemic discrimination in hiring must compare hiring ratios with ratios of groups in the candidate pool, rather than in the population at large. The key empirical argument is that there is no evidence for recent (over a period of more than 20 years) systemic discrimination against women in Canadian university hiring. The relevance of these claims to the affirmative action debate is this: if discrimination against women is the rationale for preferential treatment of women then the argument for affirmative action fails. There is, of course, much more of interest in this long article, such as an empirical examination of the often cited role-model argument for preferential treatment. But there is no claim whatever about the greater "merit" of males as Dr. Bruneau seems to believe.

The epistemological status (as philosophers like to say) of Irvine's two central claims are obviously quite different in epistemologically status (as philosophers like to say). His empirical claim is supported in considerable detail by Statistics Canada data. The data in fact supports a proposition that is even stronger than Irvine's main claim, viz., that there has been a tendency to favor women in their job searches over a fairly long recent period. Short of uncovering a massive conspiracy by Canada's statisticians I do not see how the claim can be seriously challenged.

The methodological claim is, by its nature, more open to debate. The advocates of affirmative action often assume without argument the denial of this claim. (A case in point would appear to be the article by professors Drakich and Stewart comparing the hiring policies at Windsor and York in the same issue of the Bulletin.) But since Irvine does offer careful arguments for his claim (sect. 4), the burden of proof is surely on those who would assume its falsity.

It certainly cannot be said that Dr. Bruneau’s articles is a serious examination of any of Irvine’s arguments. But perhaps it will serve a useful function if it leads some CAUT members to read Irvine’s paper itself.

Gary Wedeking
Philosophy, University of British Columbia