The Toronto Star recently reported on a new research project headed by Erin Tolley, political scientist at the University of Toronto, which suggests that women and racialized minorities chug through the political pipeline — whereas the opposite occurs for white men. For women, the toughest hurdle is at the nomination level, the first checkpoint into the political realm. Racialized minorities come up against barriers further along, beginning at the candidate selection stage.

Tolley is among the first to map the race and gender of more than 800 people vying for a political party’s nomination ahead of the 2015 vote in 136 of the country’s most diverse ridings, where racialized minorities make up at least 15 per cent of the population, half of which are in Ontario. (Her tally uses Statistics Canada’s definition of “visible minority” and therefore does not include Indigenous nomination contestants or candidates.) The full article is available here.