Juno News - April 07, 2026


School board excludes boys from career fair for “female-identifying” youth


Episode Stats


Length

2 minutes

Words per minute

156.13383

Word count

420

Sentence count

12


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.000 A school board in Ontario told parents that it was holding a careers fair for, quote, female identifying students only.
00:00:08.640 But is it? This is the Thames Valley District School Board in Ontario, which sent out basically this email to parents promoting a career discovery expo for female identifying students in grade 7 to 12.
00:00:25.280 You can read it.
00:00:25.880 now this careers fair includes pathways into skilled trades tech and apprenticeships and it's
00:00:35.320 one of several boards in the province that is under supervision and you can see in the email
00:00:40.280 here it said that the event is directed towards female identifying students now the parent who
00:00:46.980 sent me this also sent me an email from the london catholic school board so it's catholic opposite
00:00:52.840 it, which in the email also mentions, quote, hi parents, see email forwarded below. This is for
00:00:59.660 female students only. So you would think parents reading this would reasonably assume that basically
00:01:05.960 no boys are allowed. But if you follow the link to the event organizers page, that's not true.
00:01:12.180 You can see here it says while this event is directed towards female students, all grade 7
00:01:17.860 to 12 students may attend and their parents are guardians and blah, blah, blah. So it's not
00:01:24.580 exclusively for female identifying or female students at all. So why would an email to parents
00:01:30.820 omit that detail? Now, this was sent to me by a representative of the Concerned Parents
00:01:36.360 Association of London, which is a parent group, a local parent group. And they told me this kind
00:01:40.900 of messaging for them is a problem. And so they're asking, why are the school boards sending
00:01:46.180 misleading information that suggests that boys are completely excluded? And furthermore, why are
00:01:52.280 students being pushed towards having to identify as a girl, not even identify as a girl, but identify
00:01:59.140 as female? And the thing is, we see this kind of sex-based exclusion or identity-based exclusion
00:02:05.480 pretty regularly now when it comes to public service hiring or public sector hiring and
00:02:10.440 university sector hiring and now it seems to be sweeping into the k-12 education system
00:02:16.840 no boys need apply and so in this story at minimum parents are getting mixed messages
00:02:22.760 between the board and the event organizers about who can access publicly funded programs for for
00:02:29.000 youth for minors so do you think it's okay for school boards to exclude boys or at least send
00:02:35.960 misleading information that would exclude boys from career opportunities? Let me know in the comments.