York University’s new AI professor job bars men, unless they say they’re women

York University in Toronto is hiring a new professor to lead research in artificial intelligence, and it has made one thing explicit: men are not allowed to apply. A qualified male researcher — no matter how good, no matter that taxpayers are paying for the job — is barred at the door for one reason, his sex. Unless, that is, he says he’s a woman.

The job is a Tier 2 Canada Research Chair (CRC) in Artificial Intelligence and the Arts in York’s School of the Arts, Media, Performance & Design (AMPD). It is a tenure-track Assistant or Associate Professor position starting July 1, 2027. York dated the posting October 7, 2026. Applications close November 18, 2026. The listed starting salary is $130,000 to $168,000, depending on rank.

Here is the line that matters, word for word from the posting:

> “Recognizing the underrepresentation of women and gender minorities among CRCs, this position is open only to qualified researchers who indicate on the Affirmative Action self-identification form (see below) that they identify as women or gender non-conforming (e.g., genderfluid, nonbinary, Two-Spirit, trans man, trans woman). The appointment is part of the University’s Affirmative Action program, which is based on the special program provisions of the Ontario Human Rights Code.”

Qualified men are shut out for being male

Strip away the language and here is what the policy does: it takes a publicly funded job leading AI research and tells every man in the country he cannot have it. Not because he isn’t qualified. Not because a better candidate won. Simply because he is male.

A father supporting a family, a researcher who has spent a decade building exactly the expertise York is asking for, a Canadian taxpayer whose own money funds this chair — all of them are told not to bother applying. Their sex disqualifies them before a single line of their work is read. That is sex discrimination, plainly. If a university posted an AI chair “open only to men,” it would be condemned in a heartbeat, and rightly so. York has done the mirror image and dressed it up as fairness.

And the discrimination cuts deepest against the honest. The one group with no way in is men who simply tell the truth about their sex. A man willing to check the “trans woman” box clears the bar; a man who won’t lie is the only person the policy truly locks out.

Women aren’t underrepresented. They’re the majority

York says this is about “the underrepresentation of women.” The numbers say the opposite — and they come from the government’s own program.

Women already hold 52.4% of all Canada Research Chairs, and 56.3% of the Tier 2 chairs — the exact tier of this York job. The program’s combined “women and gender-equity” share is 53.6%, already past Ottawa’s own 50.9% target. (Canada Research Chairs statistics)
Among newly hired faculty, women are 52.9% of assistant professors — a majority at the entry tenure-track rank — and 45.1% of associate professors. (Statistics Canada, November 2025)
Women are 56.1% of all postsecondary students in Canada. The pipeline isn’t short of women; it’s majority women.

Women trail men in only two places that matter here: the senior full-professor rank (33.6%, a backward-looking tier full of men hired decades ago and now near retirement) and specific fields like computing and engineering (about 28.6% of math and computer-science students).

So at the very level this chair sits — a Tier 2 chair, where women are already 56.3% — the “underrepresentation” York invokes doesn’t exist. The premise is false. And a sex-based hiring bar built on a false premise isn’t “equity.” It’s just discrimination against men, dressed up with a statistic that stopped being true years ago.

Not a one-off

York has done this before, on AI chairs in particular:

Osgoode Hall Law School advertised a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Law, starting July 1, 2025, with the exact same “open only to” wording. Osgoode added that “women and gender non-conforming persons (to which this position is limited)” were encouraged to apply.
Lassonde School of Engineering advertised a Tier 2 Canada Research Chair in Computer Science: Generative Artificial Intelligence in February 2024, again with word-for-word the same restriction.

Generative AI. AI and the law. Now AI and the arts. Canada is in a global race for AI talent, and one of our biggest universities keeps cutting half the field out of its top AI jobs before anyone sends in a CV.

You’re paying for it

The Canada Research Chairs program is run by the federal government. For each Tier 2 chair, the university receives $100,000 a year for five years, plus a $20,000 annual research stipend for first-term chairs. This position is also partly funded by York’s Connected Minds program, which is funded in part by the federal Canada First Research Excellence Fund.

Ottawa built the incentive in. The CRC program requires every university to hit equity targets, including 50.9% “women and gender equity-seeking groups” by 2029. The program’s own fine print says people who “self-identify as women, transgender, gender-fluid, nonbinary and Two-Spirit” all count toward that target. Universities that miss their targets can be restricted to nominating only people from the target groups.

So the federal government counts self-identified men as women, and York writes job ads to match.

Is this even legal?

Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms says, in section 15(1), that every individual is equal “without discrimination based on … sex.” So how can a public university post a job men can’t apply for?

The answer is the very next line. Section 15(2) carves out an exception for any “law, program or activity” whose object is “the amelioration of conditions of disadvantaged … groups,” sex included. The Supreme Court (R. v. Kapp, 2008) treats it as a shield: it lets governments run affirmative-action programs for a disadvantaged group without being sued for “reverse discrimination” by the group shut out. A women-only hiring program, in other words, is the recognized exception, not an obvious violation.

There’s a second layer. The Charter mainly binds government; a university’s own hiring usually falls under the Ontario Human Rights Code instead. The Code normally forbids job ads that screen by sex, but section 14 makes the same exception for a “special program” meant to help a disadvantaged group. That is the provision York cites in the posting.

These exceptions existed to help women — but the days of under-representation are long gone, and York doesn’t even know what a woman is. They’ve opened the job to anyone who writes “woman,” “nonbinary,” “genderfluid” or “trans woman” on a form, no proof required.

A legal carve-out built for women is being used to exclude males while admitting any man who lies about his sex. That isn’t the spirit of an equality law. It’s discrimination against men without a mental illness.

Read it yourself: the full York posting.

Sources

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ontario

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