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MacMillan stands out in that British debate, where the Guardian newspaper, under the heading “Big books by blokes about battles,” gathered 12 female historians and five male peers to offer their thoughts on why only four female-authored books appeared among the 50 top-selling history titles in 2015. Attitudes among the men ranged from sympathetic to slightly incredulous: Simon Schama’s contribution consisted entirely of a list of 35 bestselling female non-fiction writers, not all of them historians or biographers (see Naomi Klein), but all writers who grappled with “big” topics. Mary Beard, author of SPQR, the bestselling (and brilliant) history of classical Rome, is “afraid that time and again, the man’s name signals knowledge and reliability, and the average punter will tend to trust a woman author to write about women and turn to a male author on the Napoleonic wars.” Beard’s own success she modestly ascribes to “an elegantly authoritative [book] jacket.”

MacMillan is 72; when she was a student at the University of Toronto a half-century ago, “there was one woman among the history faculty, and she soon departed for friendlier climes in the U.S.” Nor did her professors ask MacMillan—as they did the male students—where she planned to do graduate work. Yet she had no difficulty in finding jobs, publishers and sales, and has seen women increasingly flourish in her field.

In short, MacMillan finds the issue complicated. In the Massey Lectures she delivered last fall, she switched gears in her two final talks from the primary (male) actors in history—the Bismarcks, FDRs and Champlains—to the witnesses, the stories of those who recorded what they saw and their responses to it. That theme brought the historian to a new discovery. “When I sat down to make a list of characters in history who exhibited curiosity, most were women,” she said at the time. “I thought it was sheer accident, and then I began to wonder.”

“Canadian-born visible minority women are more likely than other women, and men, to have a university degree,” StatsCan said in its ethnic- and gender-based analysis of the 2011 National Household Survey.

Fifty per cent of second-generation visible minority Canadian women have a university degree. The rate among white women was just 27 per cent.

These second-generation visible-minority women, of prime working age, were also more likely to have a degree than visible-minority men of the same age. The visible-minority men registered at 41 per cent.

In addition, second-generation visible-minority females were more than twice as likely to have a degree than white working-age Canadian men, only 21.4 per cent of whom have a degree.

The StatsCan study found that most visible-minority women, including those who are immigrants, chose to study business, management, public administration or health. They were also far more inclined than white Canadian women to study in scientific, computer or technical fields, where men traditionally predominate.

The proportion of visible minority women and girls in Canada has quadrupled in three decades from the 1980s — to 3.2 million people. They make up 19 per cent of the national female population. And in Metro Vancouver and Toronto, visible minority women and girls make up more than 46 per cent of all women.

Although Statistics Canada discovered that visible minority women who are second-generation had the highest proportion of university degrees of any group, female immigrants to Canada also performed well in higher education.

“As a group, all visible minority women of core working age were more likely than women who were (white) to have obtained a university degree,” said StatsCan. The comparison is 40 per cent versus 27 per cent.

“This difference was even more apparent for males, with 41 per cent of visible minority males holding such a credential, compared with 21 per cent of (white) males.”

Of all ethnic groups in Canada, South Koreans (the ninth largest ethnic group) had the highest proportion of university degrees, followed by ethnic Chinese (the second largest ethnic group, after South Asians).

White males, whether born in Canada or arriving as immigrants, were consistently among the lowest in measures of educational achievement.

The StatsCan report dovetails with an earlier study by Garnet Picot and Feng Hou, of the University of Victoria.

Hou and Picot discovered young Canadians with immigrant backgrounds, most of whom are visible minorities, are almost twice as likely to go to university as students whose parents were born in Canada.

Needing to learn English as another language from kindergarten to Grade 12, their research suggested, can provide an intellectual boost for immigrants and their offspring.