As of November 2024, over 18,130 staff and faculty responded to the Employment Equity Survey, resulting in the highest response rate to date of 87.3 per cent.
Survey results are analyzed and reported in UBC’s 2024 Employment Equity Report which includes important insights into the representation of employees identifying among the following designated groups: women, Indigenous Peoples, racialized people, people with disabilities/disabled people, and non-binary, transgender, and 2SLGBQIA+ people. A significant update this year is the addition of expanded Faculty and portfolio-level data to the report.
“Employment equity is key to fostering a thriving academic community,” said Arig al Shaibah, Associate Vice-President, Equity & Inclusion. “While we’ve made important strides, sustained action is needed to break down systemic barriers and create deeper change.”
The 2025 campaign encouraging employees to complete the Employment Equity Survey or update their responses will be launched in early fall 2025. Nevertheless, UBC employees can update their responses to the Employment Equity Survey at any time.
2024 Employment Equity Report key results
The 2024 survey results show that the representation of employees from designated groups at UBC is generally on par with their representation in the regional workforce, and that there is representation of all designated groups among UBC’s broader executive senior leadership group. Overall representation of groups amongst tenure stream faculty and sessional instructors and lecturers also exceeds provincial and national workforce comparators.
However, data also reveals significant gaps in representation across all occupational categories when compared to regional, provincial and national comparator data, including amongst staff who self-identify as women, Indigenous Peoples, racialized people, and people with disabilities. The data also show that the levels of representation of designated groups among UBC faculty and staff are mixed – representation of some designated groups is low in mid-to-senior level ranks or decreases as rank increases.
Detailed findings
- Women in leadership: Women are represented in 56.6 per cent of faculty and staff roles at UBC Vancouver and 59.9 per cent of roles at UBC Okanagan, with leadership representation exceeding provincial and national averages. However, gaps remain in faculty, senior professional and supervisory roles.
- Indigenous representation: While UBC Okanagan (5.2 per cent) exceeds workforce benchmarks, UBC Vancouver (2.1 per cent) remains below national and provincial averages, with notable gaps across faculty and senior leadership, and all occupational groups.
- Racialized employees: Representation at UBC Vancouver (39.8 per cent) surpasses national and provincial levels but falls short of regional comparators at UBCV and provincial comparators at UBCO. UBC Okanagan (22.5 per cent) lags in several occupational categories, and across both campuses there are significant gaps in representation of racialized groups in the faculty bargaining unit and more than half other occupational categories.
- People with disabilities: While UBC Okanagan (11.8 per cent) aligns with workforce data, UBC Vancouver (9.3 per cent) reports lower representation. While the representation of disabled people among UBC’s executive groups is aligned with provincial and national workforce data, there are significant gaps in the representation of disabled clinical faculty at UBCV and across at least half of the occupational group categories on both campuses.
- Non-binary, transgender, and 2SLGBQIA+ employees: There is no comparable data collected by the government for these designated groups. Representation of non-binary employees, employees with trans experience, and 2SLGBQIA+ employees at both UBC Vancouver and UBC Okanagan has been steady or slightly increasing over the past four years and is currently similar across both campuses.
What’s next
UBC continues to work on closing the gaps in representation of designated groups and advancing employment equity through several initiatives.
UBC’s Equity and Inclusion Office (EIO) continues to support Faculties, portfolios, and units with more specific disaggregate data (within the bounds of privacy law) and with consultation on faculty and staff hiring practices to remove barriers to equitable employment opportunities. In addition, EIO can provide the following resources upon request to staff and faculty involved in hiring processes:
- comprehensive faculty and staff hiring guides
- an updated online course for hiring managers
- expanded availability of the Employment Equity Advisors Program
- applicant pool data and unit-level equity data to support specific hiring processes
- consultations with the Equity & Inclusion Office around equitable hiring practices