Thank you.
I'd like to thank the committee for the opportunity to speak with you today and to contribute to your study into increasing the participation of women in non-traditional occupations. My occupation is in fact a traditional occupation, it’s just not traditional to have women in it.
It’s really nice to be in a room full of such accomplished women. I’m quite accustomed to presenting to rooms full of men in my business.
Engineers Canada is a national organization of the 12 provincial and territorial associations and orders that regulate the profession of engineering in Canada. The regulators license the professional engineers. There are in excess of 160,000 professional engineers now in Canada.
My name is Marie Carter. I’m the chief operating officer at Engineers Canada. I’m also a professional engineer. With me is Gabriela Del Toro. As mentioned earlier, Gabriela is our manager of research and diversity. In our diversity portfolio, women in engineering is quite high on our radar, as is the incorporation of Canada’s indigenous population into our profession.
As do many of the witnesses you have heard from in the course of your study, the engineering profession recognizes the value that women engineers can bring. We also recognize that there remain challenges to attracting and retaining women into the profession. I’m going to provide you with a bit of the whole numbers picture for what we’re talking about.
In spite of having advanced significantly in the last 50 years, women still face barriers to participating fully in the engineering workforce. Currently, approximately 10% of licensed professional engineers are women. If we take a moment to consider the Canadian population as a whole and the fact that more than 50% of our workforce is made up of women, then having a small population of women in the engineering profession demonstrates that it’s really still not as diverse and vibrant as it should be and certainly could be. The lack of diversity is now being seen in fewer and fewer professions. We remain one of the last truly male-dominated professions in the country.
There are a number of challenges to engaging women in engineering and to keeping them there, and I'll mention a couple of them. A lack of mentors in the field, an absence of an understanding of what women can offer to engineering and what engineering can offer to women, and old attitudes about both the profession and the place of women in it are just a few of the challenges that we face.
In terms of providing mentors and role models, there’s a much smaller pool of potential female candidates to draw from. We continue to go back to just a couple that we have in the country, and we use the same role models again and again. We’d like to increase the pool of potential women engineers and retain them, and in order to do that, I believe, we must change people's understanding about what the profession has to offer as career choices for women. I made that plural--“as career choices”--because engineering is not a single choice. There are a number of choices of engineering fields.
The development of this understanding needs to happen and start at a very young age. A recent study we carried out, called the “Engineering and Technology Labour Market Study”, which was sponsored through the federal government, surveyed young women about their attitudes towards math and science and careers in engineering and technology. What we found was that young women tend to equate engineering and technology “with construction work, outdoor work, working in a cubicle”—I don’t thank the Dilbert comic strip for that—“relating primarily to computers and machines” rather than interacting with people. That is an enormous part of our field.
Young women tend to have more negative attitudes towards occupations in engineering and technology than to those in health and social sciences. In general, our study shows that they tend to prefer potential careers that are perceived as humanitarian and socially engaging. Those who were interested in engineering were interested in fields that were related to biology or the environment, things they see as being socially relevant.
We also conduct an annual survey of Canada's undergraduate and post-graduate university engineering programs. The research has been showing a gradual decline in the proportion of female undergraduate engineering students.
What happened was that in the wake of the 1989 massacre of 14 women at l'École Polytechnique de Montréal, there was a big push to increase the numbers of women in undergraduate engineering programs. By 2001 we had increased the numbers and over 20% of undergraduate students were women. Since 2001 that number has declined and is down to about 17%. So it's a significant decline when you consider the small numbers we had to start with.
Interestingly, the proportion of women enrolled in post-graduate programs has grown. I'm excited about this, but it is still a small number. We now have 23% of masters students and about 20% of doctoral students as women. Woo hoo, we're getting there. There's also a higher proportion of women among engineers in training; that is, in the four-year period after an engineer gets her degree and before she becomes a licensed engineer.
So with that higher proportion, we are probably continuing to move slowly moving towards a gender balance among practising professional engineers, although it's a long way off at the rate we're going.
These attitudes and trends for women in engineering demonstrate that we have to do a better job of raising the profile and improving the understanding of what we do, including connecting it in meaningful ways to what future generations of women are looking for in a chosen career. Some of the challenges women continue to face in the workforce are the lack of recognition of women's unique qualities, skill sets, and approaches to doing business, along with the lack of adequate support for family care and non-work responsibilities and, again, the lack of female role models.
We strongly believe that diversity, through the incorporation of women into the engineering profession to make it reflective of Canadian society, enhances our profession and our ability to serve society at large.
Along with undertaking research and collecting data on why women are not as involved in engineering as men, Engineers Canada has been working with our constituent associations through our Women in Engineering Advisory Group, comprised of female representatives of women in engineering groups of all regulators across the country, and our Women in Engineering Task Force, a task force of our board of directors, which has seen this as a really important issue that we need to try to tackle head on.
We've identified some strategies to try to work towards more balance in the profession. Some of the strategies we've worked on to attract and retain women in engineering include raising the profile and improving the image of the profession to enhance young women's understanding of what an engineering career entails. We've been helping women better prepare for the engineering workforce by promoting and facilitating the availability of the existing training programs out there, which may benefit them. We've been promoting information-sharing and mentorship programs that highlight the important role mentors play in attracting and retaining women in engineering. We've also been working with the industry on methods to help improve the retention of female engineers in the workforce, for example, celebrating companies that develop policies and practices to better attract and retain female engineers.
Some of the important things in which we think government can play a role in achieving a more diverse workforce include, where feasible, directing funding to, and working directly with, the professions to educate and inform girls about these non-traditional occupations. I'd be happy to provide you with further examples of that. Government can also play a role in ensuring that the leaders of corporations and professions are providing strategic direction to their organizations on the need for, and the benefits of, a diverse workplace with women at all levels, including senior management. Governments can also influence and work with provincial and territorial governments to ensure that labour codes and practices reflect the need for work-life balance, as demanded by modern family life.
In conclusion, we think there is an important role for women to play in all professions. Our profession is committed to improving opportunities and experiences for women in engineering.
Thank you again for the opportunity to speak with you today. I'd be happy to answer questions during the round of questions.