Status of Women Committee on April 14th, 2010

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

Thank you.

Now we go to the Bloc Québécois. Madame Beaudin.

[Josée Beaudin, Bloc, Saint-Lambert, QC]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you very much all of you for being here. You are extremely inspirational. This even makes me want to be 20 again and to choose another career. I didn't even know I could work in the mining industry, and that seems very interesting. I think that making yourself known, meeting women and making what you do known, as you are doing today, is a good way to proceed.

You know, in my constituency, there is an organization called Options non traditionnelles, whose mandate and practices are to establish contacts with people in the community, in the primary and secondary schools, in the community agencies, by finding models like you in the community. In that way, young women can see them again on other occasions, recognize them and, consequently, recognize themselves in them.

I think that meeting young people, talking about your occupation and being seen can definitely be one of the solutions. What we see in our lives are teachers who are often women, school teachers and nurses. We very rarely meet women engineers or police officers in our lives or even in the media. Lastly, women police officers are now increasingly involved in the communities, which can change things.

I think one of the major problems is work-life balance. You're right in saying that it isn't because there are women in a male environment that things change as quickly as we would like. You who have experienced everything you can experience with regard to work-life balance, what measures would you put in place, now that you are experiencing it and know it, if you had any to suggest?

I know this isn't easy even in our occupation as members of Parliament. The Bloc québécois has put in place procedures for enabling women—and men, of course, fathers—to be with their children during the children's break week.

What measures would make young women want to go into this kind of occupation? In spite of everything, these are occupations that are well paid and offer quite good working conditions. What measures would encourage young women to want to go into these occupations with a passion for this kind of work? It takes that too.

Yes, I think that women who work in these occupations have to be present in the community. However, what work-life balance measures would you suggest?

[Marie Carter]

It's an interesting question, because the one thing we recently asked all of the licensed engineers in the country was what they see as the future for women engineers. We asked that question to give us an idea about the present, because what they see as the future is usually different from the present. Surprisingly, the whole issue of how women deal with these sorts of things, balancing their career and being passionate about it while still being able to have a family, wasn't as much at the forefront. They seemed to be managing, to a large degree, to handle that somehow.

Certainly our direct experience with women engineers and those I know is that they're choosing to leave the consulting engineering industry, for example, as I did. I spent a couple of months figuring out what people do with evenings and weekends when I finished working in the consulting industry, because it was a long time since I had those times off.

So in order to cope, women are making career choices and they're delaying the advancement of their careers to have a family. So any kinds of supports that would allow them to continue progress in their careers, rather than delaying them, would be beneficial.

[Josée Beaudin, Bloc, Saint-Lambert, QC]

What is the average age, for example, among the group of women engineers?

[Marie Carter]

Well, the age is actually young now. People of my age are less than 10% in the engineering field. The growing percentage is of those who are about 30 years old now. That's where our wave is coming from: they are about 30 years old. They're having kids.

[Josée Beaudin, Bloc, Saint-Lambert, QC]

We have far too little time to hear from you. I'm sorry; it's frustrating.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

Thank you very much.

The NDP member has left, so we now go to the Conservatives and Madame Boucher.

[Sylvie Boucher, Conservative, Beauport—Limoilou, QC]

Good afternoon, mesdames. It's great to hear from women who have such fascinating careers. It was also news to me that we could work in the mines. I must admit it's quite tempting. These are things that we have little or no knowledge of, often as a result of education.

To go back to what someone said a little earlier, it's often said that girls or young girls and mathematics or technology... I have two daughters, 20 and 21, and they aren't very attracted because they don't think this is prestigious enough. We often get the impression that it's a mountain, and we don't always make these occupations attractive. We women like things with more emotion. For us, figures don't tell us a lot about emotions. They speak to our heads.

We talked about image. I'm really concerned about that because I realize, when I speak with my daughters' group of girls and their friends, that they often have a biased image of women who carry on non-traditional occupations. The image that those kinds of women often project is that of tomboys, and yet a lot of women in those occupations can be in uniforms in mines and be very well dressed and in high heels five minutes later.

How do we go about selling these occupations to young girls? We're talking about the generation following us, and we see how fascinating it can be to carry on a non-traditional occupation. How can we educate our young girls across Canada so that these occupations become attractive to them?

[Mary Ann Mihychuk]

I often try to translate how the career can attract anybody. I recently spoke to a grade five class and asked them, who wants to travel around the world and make an enormous amount of money and find a diamond mine? Every kid in the class had their hand up; they wanted to travel, see the world, and have a fabulous career. That's mining today.

Women are better communicators. We work with a lot of scientists. They could use improvement; let's just put it that way. Women have that skill set. Gaining a social license for Canadian companies, which is Bill C-300.... We are the best in the world, and there's always room for improvement. Often it's a question of our ability to communicate how we're safe and clean and sophisticated in a mining industry, and that voice coming from a woman can be often much more powerful than the traditional methods that we've used may be.

There are many jobs—financial, being CEO, being that communicator, going to the darkest jungles of Africa—and a mining project changes their world, and for the most part in a positive way, bringing wealth, development, schools, medicines. We can be very proud of our industry, and I think there are many different jobs that are of great interest to women. We just need some help getting on TV spots, getting the media to be interested. They want to hear about disasters; they want to hear about mistakes. That's inherent in how the media works.

That's where government comes in. You have programs, you have educational institutions, you have NRCan. We need to use those tools to be able to present the industry—engineering, mining, the RCMP—in a way that we understand it: wonderful, well-paying, successful, and opening the doors to the world.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

You have thirty seconds.

[Sylvie Boucher, Conservative, Beauport—Limoilou, QC]

So we have to change the image we have. You talked about the media, and it's true that the media sell an often negative image of everything; it's sensationalism. If we could project this image of women, it would also vastly change the perception that society has because it's often incorrect. It's not just the government. Within society itself, women have to do something together to make the image change.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

I'm sorry, that's the end, Sylvie. Thank you.

I want to thank the witnesses for coming. It was a very interesting session. You represent a very wide range of occupations that are interesting.

We have to move on now to some business of the committee, so we will suspend for a minute and then we will go in camera.

[Proceedings continue in camera]