Frequently Asked Questions

At TMU, we believe that having faculty and staff who reflect the diversity of our students and our city makes us a better university. It is critical to TMU's success to remove barriers and promote the inclusion of all TMU employees, including those from equity deserving groups.  

Your information will help us determine where we are now so we can set realistic equity, diversity and inclusion goals and measure our progress. In turn, we’re able to create plans and strategies that improve the work experience of TMU employees.

Aggregated data, for example, percentages of employee representation by equity group,will be used to set equity, diversity and inclusion goals, develop action plans, and monitor progress. It will also be used to inform strategies for improving the work experience and climate for employees, particularly those from equity-deserving groups.

The information is stored in your eHR record and is available to you through employee self service. Beyond your own access, your responses are only available to a few individuals in HR and the Office of the Vice-President, Equity and Community Inclusion (OVPECI) whose job it is to produce diversity  data for recruitment, retention and strategic planning purposes.

Read more about privacy and confidentiality.

There is ample evidence of discrimination and systemic barriers that limit the participation of women, racialized people, Black people, First Nations, Inuit and Métis Peoples, persons with disabilities and 2SLGBTQ+ people in the Canadian workforce or particular occupations.

Collecting data on these groups does not mean the university is only concerned about improving the work experience for these employees. In fact, research shows that making the workplace more diverse, equitable and inclusive for these groups benefits all employees.

How you identify is personal. The choices provided may not fit with how you see yourself as an individual. The existing terminology was developed and has evolved with ongoing input from faculty and staff from equity deserving groups. Some terminology is used because it aligns with the Canadian Census, such as the list of racialized groups. This allows us to compare TMU’s employee representation with the external community. You may not recognize the terminology used, so we provided explanations of the terminology within the questionnaire to help you respond to the questions. The university will continue to consult our community and make changes to the language we use.

As difficult as it might be to group people in this way, we cannot assess our equity, diversity and inclusion progress without doing so. It's important to note that we are not asking you to consider if you identify in these groups for any other purpose, or to label yourself with this terminology.

Your responses will help TMU understand the diversity of its faculty and staff from a university-wide perspective, but also at different levels, in different types of jobs, and in different areas of the university. The data will help us track our progress toward reflecting the diversity of our students and community across the university.

Most of the aggregated Diversity Self-ID data is available to all members of the TMU community, particularly our employees, on the Diversity Data Centre. We ask you to “Count yourself in” and trust that you can see yourself reflected in the data, such as the percentage representation of equity-deserving groups among faculty and staff.

Building equity, diversity and inclusion at the university is a shared responsibility of all TMU community members – it’s important that you are informed about the numbers so you can incorporate the information in your plans, decision-making and actions.

As a university in one of the most dynamic and diverse cities in the world, TMU aspires to reflect its students and surrounding community. This is aligned with the values of the Academic Plan.   

The Diversity Self-ID data can help in the following ways:

• better understand the experiences of employees from equity deserving groups
• spark discussions about the barriers and biases that can limit progress towards achieving our goals
• identify ways to remove those barriers
• reduce the impact of biases to help us take action to create a more inclusive community for all  

The data allow us to assess the effectiveness of our diversity initiatives and make changes to our plans where necessary.

Diversity in an organization, particularly in an educational institution, has been shown to improve critical-thinking skills. Combined with equity and inclusion, diversity helps to prepare our students to succeed in a pluralistic society, with more and more individuals who have diverse backgrounds, perspectives and experiences.

The Diversity Data Centre provides recruitment, representation and retention data. Overall, TMU’s workforce is diverse, but that diversity isn’t evenly distributed. The data  illustrates this fact by providing information based on type of work and different areas of the university. Smaller offices, areas, academic departments, and school data are not published online. 

This information is available in data visualizations.

There is ample evidence of discrimination and systemic barriers that limit the participation of women, racialized people, Black people, First Nations, Inuit and Métis Peoples, persons with disabilities and 2SLGBTQ+ people in the Canadian workforce.

Collecting data on these groups does not mean the university is only concerned about improving the work experience for these employees. In fact, research shows that making the workplace more diverse, equitable and inclusive for these groups benefits all employees.

The percentages in the report reflect the representation of employees who self-identified as part of one or more equity group(s), as a portion of employees who completed the survey. If 50 percent of employees identified as women, it doesn’t mean that the other 50 percent of employees were men. The other 50 percent includes those who indicated that they don’t identify as women; for example, those who identified as non-binary, as well as those who indicated they preferred not to answer the question.

We could have removed those who indicated they preferred not to answer the question, but this would likely have resulted in overstating the representation of equity-seeking groups since it reduces the denominator used to calculate the percentages. With any survey, there will always be limitations. However, the data in the report does provide a good snapshot of the representation of equity-deserving groups for the period covered in the report.

Further, employees can identify as part of any equity group they consider themselves part of, so they may be counted more than once in the data. For example, one employee could identify as a woman, racialized or Black person, First Nations, Inuit or Métis person, person with disabilities and as an 2SLGBTQ+ employee. With this in mind, the data doesn’t tell us about the representation of those who do not belong to any of the equity-deserving groups.

The Diversity Self-ID data is considered a snapshot because it reflects the representation of equity groups based on active employees on October 1 of specific years (e.g. 2016, 2018 and 2020)

The data on recruitment, promotion and exits of full-time faculty is for the period from August 16 of one year to August 15 of the following year, and is combined over a five-year period (e.g. 2018 to 2022). For staff it is from January 1 to December 31 of a given year, combined over a five-year period.

TMU’s  workforce changes depending on the time of year. Therefore, the representation changes depending on when you look at it. October 1 is selected as the date for reporting because it is one of the times when TMU has peak employment, so we can get a good sense of the representation of employees who work full-time as well as those who work temporarily during the academic year, such as teaching and graduate assistants.

Overall, our goal is to understand the picture of representation the data provides.

This is largely due to the availability of data about larger community representation outside of TMU.

Most of the community representation data comes from Statistics Canada, from the Census or special surveys, such as the Canadian Survey on Disability, used for comparison data for  persons with disabilities.

While we do have data from Statistics Canada on the representation of First Nations, Inuit and Métis Peoples in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA), given the fact that many Indigenous Peoples live in Indigenous communities outside of the GTA, the Ontario data is used for comparison.

Statistics Canada's Census data currently does not provide information about the representation of the 2SLGBTQ+ community. However, the Toronto Public Health survey conducted in 2001 provides some idea of the representation of this group in the city, even if it is outdated. It is challenging to report on the representation from this equity group because we lack good data to compare the university representation with community representation. There is some information available from Statistics Canada in the Canadian Community Health Survey (CCHS). However, data available from some American surveys and from some Canadian universities suggests that the CCHS data understates the representation of 2SLGBTQ+ people in Ontario. In addition, the survey does not provide data for the GTA.  

The Canadian Census still has no question on sexual orientation or general question about whether Canadians identify as 2SLGBTQ+. As a result, we continue to use an outdated source. We are working to develop a new method for identifying the community representation of 2SLGBTQ+ people in the GTA to have better information to measure TMU against in the future.

Data about First Nations, Inuit  and Métis Peoples, women,racialized people and Black people

The GTA and Ontario data used to compare representation of women, racialized, Black, First Nations, Inuit and Métis employees at TMU comes from the most recent Census data available, e.g. 2021.

Data about employees with disabilities

The Ontario data used to compare representation of employees with disabilities at TMU comes from the Canadian Survey on Disability on working age (16-64) persons with disabilities in Canada.

Data about 2SLGBTQ+ employees

Toronto data used for comparison with the representation of 2SLGBTQ+ employees at TMU comes from a 2001 Toronto Public Health survey.

Student data is from responses to the Student Diversity Self-ID, which is available on the Student Diversity Data Centre website.