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208 Women in statistics in CanadaA rise in consciousness of the status of women in the late 1960s and early1970s was marked by several initiatives in Canada; a landmark was the tablingof the Royal Commission on the Status of Women in 1970, which recommendedthat gender-based discrimination in employment be prohibited acrossthe country (as it had been in several provinces). Women began to be electedin greater numbers to positions in the learned societies in those years. In1975, Audrey Duthie of the University of Regina and Kathleen (Subrahmaniam)Kocherlakota of the University of Manitoba were the first women tobe elected to the Board of Directors of the Statistical Science Association ofCanada, one of the ancestors of the Statistical Society of Canada (SSC); thisstory is chronicled in Bellhouse and Genest (1999). Gail Eyssen (now of theUniversity of Toronto) was elected to the SSC Board in 1976. Since that year,there has always been at least one woman serving on the Board; beginning inabout 1991, there have been several each year.The second woman to become President of the SSC was Jane F. Gentleman,whom I met first when I came to Waterloo in 1969. She was a fine rolemodel and supportive mentor. Dr. Gentleman moved to Statistics Canadain 1982, and in 1999 she became the Director of the Division of Health InterviewStatistics at the National Center for Health Statistics in Maryland.She was the winner of the first annual Janet L. Norwood Award in 2002 forOutstanding Achievement by a Woman in the Statistical Sciences.I met K. Brenda MacGibbon-Taylor of the Université du Québec àMontréal in 1993, when I was appointed to the Statistical Sciences Grant SelectionCommittee by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Councilof Canada (NSERC). Dr. MacGibbon was Chair of the Committee that year,the first woman to fill that position, and I came to have a great admiration forher expertise and judgment. She obtained her PhD at McGill in 1970, workingin K-analytic spaces and countable operations in topology under the supervisionof Donald A. Dawson. During her career, Dr. MacGibbon has workedin many areas of statistics, with a continuing interest in minimax estimationin restricted parameter spaces.Another student of Dawson, probabilist Gail Ivanoff, was the first womanto fill the position of Group Chair of the Mathematical and Statistical SciencesEvaluation Group at NSERC, from 2009 to 2012. Dr. Ivanoff, who works onstochastic processes indexed by sets, as well as point processes and asymptotics,is a key member of the very strong group of probabilists and mathematicalstatisticians in the Ottawa–Carleton Institute for Mathematics andStatistics.AthirdDawsonstudent,ColleenD.Cutler,wasthefirstwomantobeawarded the CRM–SSC Prize, awarded jointly by the SSC and the Centrede recherches mathématiques (Montréal) in recognition of accomplishmentsin research by a statistical scientist within 15 years of the PhD. The award,which she received in the third year of its bestowing, recognizes her work atthe interface of non-linear dynamics and statistics, and in particular non-linear