Montreal Gazette (blog) - Honouring Carrie Derrick, Canada's first female professor on International Women's Day

Carrie Derrick was a botanist, gardener, suffragette, social reformer and founder of McGill's Genetics Department. She supported birth control decades before it was fashionable or acceptable.

In 1911, the first year International Women's Day was celebrated, Derrick  was the first woman listed in American Men of Science. She'd been teaching at McGill for seven years in 1905 when she was named an assistant professor, with a salary of $1,250 -- about a third what her male colleagues were earning.

At a time when female students outnumber males in all but a handful of disciplines, it's easy to forget pioneers like Derrick and Maude Abbott, another McGill graduate who forged the way. Luckily, there are folks out there like Ingrid Birker, who runs science programs at the Redpath Museum and has a special place in her heart for those early champions of women's educational rights.