December 6th is National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women here, and this year it’s the 23rd anniversary of the École Polytechnique Massacre. In the past year, the long gun registry, which was put in place in 1995 after considerable debate (and pressure from women’s groups and gun control advocates), has been unceremoniously scrapped. One of the perceived front-runners in the Liberal leadership race now contends that it was a failure, even though he previously voted for keeping it. Each year there’s fewer and smaller memorial services and recognition of the day, as it fades out of the collective memory and into a shadowy box labelled “History.” I’m not an advocate of dwelling on the past, but I think the massacre’s anniversary is an important touchstone in Canadian women’s history, and I’m concerned that that seems to be a minority opinion. There’s not a lot of touchstones in Canadian women’s history.

I am a woman, a physicist, and a feminist. I am exactly the sort of person that Lépine was trying to silence, so it’s important to me to take a moment to reflect both on how fortunate I am to live in a time and place where I can pursue a scientific career and an advanced degree, and on how much more work there is to be done to reduce gender inequality and drive out the ignorant attitudes and outright misogyny that allows attitudes like Lépine’s to flourish. Each year around this time there’s usually some dreck written (almost invariably by a man) about how Lépine was a lone madman, and there’s no cultural significance to the fact that he actively sought out women to murder and explicitly said that he was killing them because they were women (and assumed feminists), and right on cue, there’s an article that can only in the more generous of worlds be called drivel published in the National Post yesterday that does just that. I’m not linking to it (google it if you feel like spiking your blood pressure in anger), but the (male) author posits that the real victims are men, Conservatives, and anyone who is against the long gun registry. Apparently all three groups are “bitterly attacked” every year around the anniversary, and that’s totally more important than the fact that women face vastly disproportionate amounts of violence (domestic, sexual, physical, institutional, economic,…) every single day. If we ladies realized that we’ve bruised a few men’s egos and just stopped acknowledging that one of the most public acts of violence against women in Canadian history occurred, then everything would be peaches and sunshine!

Absolutely not. We need to drag misogyny out into the light, call it what it is, and work to dismantle it, not wring our collective hands about the dented egos of men who make every issue primarily about themselves. Dented egos do not trump institutionalized violence, and the fact that this sort of dreck can still be published in a national newspaper is indication enough that there is still considerable work to be done.

So every December 6th, regardless of how much work I have on my desk or have managed to clear off my desk, I sit down and do science. Thankfully, actions like Lépine’s are rare, but the attitude and cultural narrative that informed his actions is still pervasive, and women are still woefully underrepresented in STEM fields at all levels. It’s a small action, but it’s important to me that on a day where women were silenced for pursuing what was perceived by Lépine (and plenty of others) to be men’s rightful work, I continue to contribute my voice and my work to a similarly male-dominated field. I’m currently working on writing a paper for publication, and it’s the first paper I’m working on in my PhD. I don’t expect that scores of people will read it, but I’m proud that I can contribute to academic literature, and I’m proud to put my female name on my work. I’m fortunate that I can be a part of normalizing the presence of women and their contributions to science, so that hopefully, women and girls who follow me will have an easier path.