On DEI and International Women's Day

Happy International Women's Day 2025!

I have been fortunate to have many wonderful, intelligent, capable, and courageous women in my life, including in my career. I’ve also witnessed woman targeted unfairly, excluded from interviews and decisions, and many instances of wage disparity.

I remember early in my career, my manager quit, and we had an opening. It came down to two candidates - a man and a woman. The director came down from Toronto for the final interviews and I was included in them.

The woman candidate was far superior, in every way. When we met together after the interviews, the director immediately ruled her out. He said, “we know she wouldn't fit into our culture" and gave us a knowing look. I challenged him and he confirmed it was because she was a woman and that she wouldn't fit in because our department was almost entirely men.

Afterwards I went to HR to tell them what happened. I got the feeling that HR themselves were too afraid to do anything because we were newly acquired, and many people were losing their jobs. The local representatives of the new company had a very intimidating and bullying approach. Fortunately, the Paris HQ figured this out and cleaned house. Ironically, the man mentioned above was fired by an incredibly capable woman.

This is what DEI means. It means we should consider every candidate based on their merits and not exclude anyone because they don't look like us, aren't our gender, or not from our same backgrounds. If someone spews nonsense about DEI and uses it as a weapon, please consider that they may have failed one of simplest ethical and intelligence tests. This hateful nonsense continues to make me angry.

Let me get back to celebrating International Women’s Day with some more positive thoughts.

Years ago, my colleague Sara started a tradition of celebrating International Women’s Day in the office. I volunteered to speak at the first one and chose to talk about someone who I met years before, that did her part in saving my life and many others. This person was Cheryll Gasner, and I met her at the Stanford Medical Center in California after having my open-heart surgery to repair my aortic aneurysm which saved my life.

Cheryll worked as a Nurse Practitioner at Stanford in the Marfan Syndrome clinic. She came to talk to me, and she was the first person I met who also had Marfan Syndrome. Cheryll told me her story and background. Her dad died tragically of Marfan when she was young. His death was completely devastating on its own, but on top of that Cheryll found out that she and her sister also had the disease. Not long later, Cheryll’s sister would tragically die from Marfan related issues as well.

Cheryll decided she was a fighter and did everything the doctors told her to limit any harm to her body. She vowed that she would dedicate her life to helping others affected by Marfan Syndrome.

Cheryll went to school to become a nurse practitioner and helped start the National Marfan Foundation. That’s how I was first introduced to her – via the newsletters and documents my mother signed up for from the Marfan Foundation. Cheryll wrote documentation for parents, patients, and medical professionals. She worked in research, wrote scholarly articles, and travelled the country and world to help people. Marfan was a rarely diagnosed disease and Cheryll’s work helped change that.

Seeing her at my bedside in the hospital was like seeing a superhero in real life. I will always be grateful for her and for every other strong and capable woman in my life and career.

We live not too far distant from a time where woman had no real rights in this country. In my mother’s lifetime and not woman had a right to vote. It wasn’t until 1960 that all women in Canada gained that right, when my mother was 18 years old. In my lifetime, the Canadian Human Rights Act of 1977 was passed, forbidding discrimination on the basis of sex and ensuring equal pay for work of equal value for women. Almost fifty years later woman are still paid unfairly and discriminated against in the workplace. In many parts of the world, the situation for women is far more dire.

We can’t forget the progress that has been made or let ourselves backslide to previous unfair and unjust times. We need to be active participants in our societies to do everything we can make things fair, equitable, and just. Please speak up and act when you see this type of discrimination and please be grateful and appreciate all the wonderful women in your life.