There's been a big deal made about having gender balance in the new Canadian Federal Cabinet. It's the first time there have been an equal number of men and women. That's representative of the Canadian population. According to Wikipedia overall the female to male ratio is 51:49 in Canada, 49:51 in the 15-64 age range. That's close enough to 50:50.
Are women equally well represented in Canadian family history society leadership?
I checked 10 genealogical and family history societies from Vancouver Island to Newfoundland.
The most frequent ratio was two-thirds women, one-third men. Only one society had a majority of men.
Based on Canadian membership of the Association of Professional Genealogists about 75% are women. Female membership of the Board for Certification of Genealogists is a couple of percentage points greater.
Two of the ten societies, BIFHSGO and VGS, have more than 75% female directors.
Traditionally it has always been the women in a family who cared for aging parents, who wrote letters back to the old country, and kept journals and diaries, so it is not perhaps unusual that so many women are genealogists.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the data, though, John. Just the kind of thing we can hope to get again from the Long Form Census!