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206 Women in statistics in CanadaIn 1950, the University of Manitoba was the first to recognize statisticsin the name of a department (the Department of Actuarial Mathematics andStatistics). The two first Departments of Statistics were formed at the Universityof Waterloo and the University of Manitoba in 1967. There are nowfour other separate statistics or statistics and actuarial science departments,at the University of Toronto, Western University in Ontario, the University ofBritish Columbia, and Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia.19.3 A collection of firsts for womenWhen I was a university student in the years 1961–65, there were few womenprofessors in departments of mathematics in Canada. One of the exceptionswas Constance van Eeden, who had come in the early 1960s (Clarke, 2003).Dr. van Eeden was born in 1927 in the Netherlands. She finished high schoolin 1944, and when the Second World War was over, she attended university,graduating in 1949 with a first degree in mathematics, physics and astronomy.She then entered a new actuarial program for her second degree, and in 1954began as a part-time assistant at the Statistics Department at the Math ResearchCenter in Amsterdam. She received her PhD cum laude in 1958. Aftersome time at Michigan State and some time in Minneapolis, she and her husband(Charles Kraft, also a statistician) moved to the Université de Montréal— where, in contrast to the situation at their previous two institutions, therewas no regulation against both members of a couple having tenure in the samedepartment.A specialist in mathematical statistics and in particular estimation in restrictedparameter spaces, van Eeden was the first woman to receive the GoldMedal of the Statistical Society of Canada, in 1990. She has an extensive scientific“family tree”; two of her women students went on to academic careers inCanada: Louise Dionne (Memorial University of Newfoundland) and SoranaFroda (UniversitéduQuébec àMontréal).There are, or were, other women statisticians in Canada born in the 1920s,but most have had their careers outside academia. The 34th Session of theInternational Statistical Institute was held in Ottawa fifty years ago, in 1963— the only time the biennial meeting of the ISI has been held in Canada. TheProceedings tell us the names of the attendees. (Elizabeth L. Scott, from theUniversity of California, Berkeley, was one.) Of the 136 Canadian “guests,”14 were women. Their names are listed in Table 19.1.One of the two from universities in this list is the first and so far theonly woman to hold the position of Chief Statistician of Canada: WinnipegbornSylvia Ostry, CC OM FRSC, an economist (PhD 1954) who was ChiefStatistician from 1972 to 1975. In 1972, as she began her mandate, Dr. Ostry