Trailblazer

The date — December 6, 1989 — still resonates with Canadians, particularly women in science, technology, engineering , and mathematics. On that Wednesday, a misogynistic gunman entered the École Polytechnique, in Montreal. He ordered the male students out of a classroom and shot the nine women, killing six. He then killed eight more, ranting about feminists taking jobs from men, before shooting himself.

Monique Frize was to start as the University of New Brunswick’s first chair for women in engineering on December 11 — the day of the joint funeral for nine of the fourteen victims. “Instead of going to my office,” she writes in her autobiography, A Woman in Engineering , “I was attending an especially poignant funeral.” Frize left the service at the Notre-Dame Basilica with Claudette MacKay-Lassonde (the first female president of the Association of Professional Engineers of Ontario) and Micheline Bouchard (who would become the first female president of the...