We proudly recognize the achievements and contributions of changemaking women within our community and their year-round efforts to advance important conversations on everything from equity and diversity to sustainability and unity.
This International Women’s Day, read about some of our community's dedicated women researchers, each actively working to build a more inclusive world for us all.
Visit our Internatioanal Women's Day webpage for more stories, resources and events.
RRU grad inspires environmental stewardship
Pop quiz! You've got a sugar packet and a plastic bread-bag tag. Do they belong in the garbage, recycling or compost bin?
"We see these things everyday and many people just don't know where they belong," says Wasan Jema, MSEM alumni and waste program specialist for The Town of Okotoks.
Her current focus is on managing organics. Education is important, because organic waste can get buried in the landfill and make methane gas.
Polar bears + people: a study of coexistence
A Royal Roads University student combined her education and her passion for conservation to create a story-based research project focused on how humans and polar bears coexist in a town known for the creatures.
Churchill, located on the shore of Hudson Bay in Manitoba’s far north, is billed as the “Polar Bear Capital of the World” because of the bears’ presence in town at certain times of year, and Kt Miller has been visiting from her home in Montana for more than a decade while working with Polar Bears International. She took photos and video, and helped the non-profit set up and operate livestreaming cameras that catch polar bears and other wildlife in their element.
Find out how Indigenous knowledge played an integral part in her thesis.
Peer-to-peer conversations explore climate change
If you think talking climate change and energy transition in Canada’s oil patch province might be difficult, think again. Amber Bennett, who has been passionate about the environment since she was a child, credits her time in Royal Roads’ Master of Arts in Environmental Education and Communications program with influencing Re.Climate’s focus on translating research into action: “It was a lot of work, but it was also a joy. And it allowed me to knit together many different parts of myself — as a parent, a professional and an environmentalist.”
Bubbling over with business ideas
Meet award-winning Master of Global Management student Rita Akinwalere, whose entrepreneurial spirit began at only eight with a fizzy drink she sold to friends.
Akinwalere is committed to empowering young girls in northern Nigeria in business and entrepreneurship and is the most recent recipient of the Award for Diversity and Community Building.
"This award makes me see that what I do matters,” she says.
Bring your whole self: women tourism leaders share secrets of success
When examining issues for women in leadership, it’s easy to skew negative: why are there so few? What barriers do women face?
New research coming from Royal Roads University sets out to do the opposite. Instead, it looks at what is working well.
It’s an approach that makes sense for the tourism and hospitality industry.
Passion paired with purpose leads student to Elizabeth Fry Society
Nicole Kudor has worked in sales, publishing and advertising for the last 20 years, but both her education and her heart have long been rooted in concerns about justice and inequality.
Now, she’s pairing those passions with purpose on a work term with Elizabeth Fry Society in Victoria, BC as she pursues her Master of Arts in Justice Studies at Royal Roads University.
“Time traveling” researcher says education doesn’t equal empowerment for women
In low-income countries, layers of colonial history can plague generations. They work, they strive, they struggle, but lack of resources, education and opportunity — even the idea of opportunity — combine to hold down women and girls especially.
In her research and her long and ongoing commitment to a small group of women whom she met as girls in one such nation, Prof. Shelley Jones aims to dig through the strata of politics, religion, economic policies and often misguided approaches to development under which they toil to raise them up — and, more importantly, to help them see how they can raise themselves up.
April Hicke raises a “Toast” to women in tech
Tech industry workforces are notoriously male-dominated. Not only is it difficult for women to get jobs in tech — the MIT Technology Review estimated last year that the proportion of women in technical roles at large companies was “a painfully low 25%” — they’re often offered lower pay than their male peers when hired.
April Hicke and Marissa McNeelands have both worked in tech and they believe they have a solution to the gender gap based on building a supportive community for women and partnering with companies looking to hire more women.
Learn about their solution to help women do the work that they want, for the pay they deserve.