Status of Women Committee on April 23rd, 2015

[Joan Crockatt, Conservative, Calgary Centre, AB]

Good. I'm sure you're aware of the women on boards initiative.

This morning it just so happened that I was up at the crack of dawn, doing an announcement with Kellie Leitch, the Minister of Status of Women, announcing $300,000 for women in the electrical industry. These are professional engineers and linemen and everything, the whole gamut. One thing I realized, because it was in the notes I gave this morning, is that this January we announced opening the applications for over $100 million in interest-free loans every year through the Canada apprentice loan initiative. I'm wondering if women know that these kinds of funds are available to them now. Whatever you could do to help us get that message out, I think it's really important that women know.

The other piece of information I'll pass on, which we heard at this committee and that I thought was critical, was we're always talking about wanting women to earn the same for the same. Not enough women were going into sciences, so we're trying to get the message out to go into sciences. We're seeing that more women are choosing life sciences as opposed to math-based sciences, and it's in the math-based sciences—engineering, computer science, mathematics—that you make the most money.

[The Chair, NDP, Hélène LeBlanc]

Mrs. Crockatt—

[Joan Crockatt, Conservative, Calgary Centre, AB]

Are there any quick comments from any of you on those? Thank you for reminding me.

[Sandra Eix]

As a person with a Ph.D. in physics, I can assure you that progress has been slow. I think the role of mentorship is enormous, so the ability to see people a couple of steps ahead who are doing what you want to do, the ability to talk about those stories in a way that doesn't say this is the first woman professor at SFU, the way to do that is huge.

There are so many of these mentorship organizations. SCWIST has a program called ms infinity, which does programs for kids just the way WISE does. There are WISE-similar organizations all across the country.

It frustrates the living daylights out of me that they're not connected. When there's one woman in physics here and one woman in physics there—

[The Chair, NDP, Hélène LeBlanc]

Thank you, so connecting. Thank you very much.

Ms. Duncan, you have five minutes.

[Kirsty Duncan, Liberal, Etobicoke North, ON]

Thanks, Madam Chair.

Dr. McInturff, if you could make specific recommendations to this committee regarding pay equity, what would they be? It's been 100 years.

[Joan Crockatt, Conservative, Calgary Centre, AB]

Choose engineering, not biology.

[Natalie Linklater]

The gap is still there.

[Dr. Kate McInturff]

Yes, the gap is almost everywhere.

We had a commission on pay equity that made quite substantial recommendations. I would say implementing those very substantial recommendations would be a good start.

I would also say that voluntary and awareness-raising activities are fantastic, making people aware of their biases is very important, but that the evidence shows that unless there's some kind of regulation, some kind of proactive tracking of pay gaps where they exist, then we don't close them. We need regulatory levers.

I appreciate that's not always popular, but the evidence shows that without them we don't see pay gaps close. To me, if you aren't measuring and you aren't requiring people to address the gap, to show that they're doing something to close it, then it's not going to close on its own.

[Kirsty Duncan, Liberal, Etobicoke North, ON]

The recommendation is for regulation, we need to measure.

Do we have challenges with measuring, and how would you overcome them?

[Dr. Kate McInturff]

In non-unionized sectors, and in the non-unionized private sector in particular, there isn't the same level of transparency. There are all kinds of reasons that private sector employers don't want to be transparent about who's getting paid what, but I think we have to weigh those interests against the interests of fairness, and indeed non-discrimination, as guaranteed in our charter, which require a certain amount of transparency.

Transparency is one other thing that makes a huge difference. You can imagine, just behaviourally, if you're in a workplace and you know what people are getting paid, and you know that the person down the hall from you is getting paid more, and you went to school with them, you're probably going to say something about it. That level of transparency within the workplace can create movement in the workplace, where employees can bring pressure. It doesn't have to be antagonistic. That push from within will also help level that playing field more.

[Kirsty Duncan, Liberal, Etobicoke North, ON]

You also said implement the recommendations of the pay equity study.

[Dr. Kate McInturff]

Yes. They spent a lot of time and they heard from a lot of witnesses, and the report is like a phone book. I think there's a lot of work there that we could profit from.

[Kirsty Duncan, Liberal, Etobicoke North, ON]

Since you are at the university, it's come up that it's biological versus physical sciences. Has anyone here looked at pay equity within departments?

[Rim Khazall]

There are actually a couple of reports online. I'm not going to start spouting figures because those would be science fallacies, but there are actually quite a few resources online. We have them labelled on our WISE website. We'd be more than happy to send them your way. But pay equity is real, and the lack of it is real. It's kind of shocking for both of us, too, because if I do want to go into academia, I'm going to be earning less than my lab mate is, and he's weirder than I am, so I don't know if that's a win.

[Some hon. members]

Oh, oh!

[Kirsty Duncan, Liberal, Etobicoke North, ON]

I've heard stories in which the man is presented a range of salaries and the woman is given a number.

[Rim Khazall]

Yes, and then you have to negotiate it. A couple of my colleagues are just on their way to defend. One of them got a job at the same place my lab mate got a job, and I'm not going to say where. He was given a range, and he was given the higher end of the range. She was given a number. I told her to go tell them to up that number. Both of them have Ph.D.s, and the positions were different, so granted the pay was a little different, but it was $60,000 for a Ph.D. in neuroscience versus the $89,000 he was making, so that's two steps down.

[Kirsty Duncan, Liberal, Etobicoke North, ON]

Thank you.

I'm going to ask Ms. McInturff one last question, which has just gone out of my head.

[Some hon. members]

Oh, oh!

[Kirsty Duncan, Liberal, Etobicoke North, ON]

It's gone. I was just going to pick up on the number versus the range. Oh, I know. What's the recommendation to the committee? How do you start getting at these universities? Is it possible to get at these?

[Dr. Kate McInturff]

I had a really interesting experience with my uncle, who is a senior academic at a medical school. They were saying that they're trying to deal with the fact that they have far more women now. There are lots of women in medicine and maternity leave is a real thing, so they were asking if they should create two tracks of different lengths, a 10-year one to go up for tenure and another one that is five years to go up for tenure. He worked out that if you did that, women would be taken less seriously. He realized that they actually needed to think about their rates of tenure and promotion for men and women and to treat men and women as if they have equal levels of responsibility in terms of how they balance work and family life. Then they would not just be reinforcing the idea that women need to take that extra time, which then reinforces the fact that women do take that extra time, which then reinforces the idea that they're not serious and we can't promote them, and so on.

[The Chair, NDP, Hélène LeBlanc]

Thank you very much.

Mr. Barlow, you now have the floor for seven minutes.

[John Barlow, Conservative, Macleod, AB]

I don't know whether Sandra or Danniele wants to answer this, but I saw that you were given some funding from Status of Women for a mentorship project called “Make Possible: Together we create opportunity”. You haven't had a chance to speak about that, but I'm wondering if, since we've heard from everybody about how important mentoring is in this process, you can tell us a little bit about that program. Have you had some success? Where is it right now?

[Sandra Eix]

Sure. We have Status of Women funding for—and it's ridiculous that I don't have the exact numbers at my fingertips—a three-year program, I believe. It's a substantial piece of funding. What we are doing is creating a mentorship network. There are two broad components to it. One is creating a site that I'd describe as having sort of a little bit LinkedIn, a little bit Facebook, and an awful lot of what I've described as “SCWIST love” in it. It's an online place where men and women can sign up to have conversations around skills.

The notion we started out with was to have mentors connected to mentees. We realized that is actually not what people wanted. People wanted to be both mentors and mentees. Having that unidirectional passing of wisdom was not what people wanted. What they wanted to do was to share skills. The website, which is up now at makepossible.ca, is an opportunity for people to sign on, choose their skills—skills they have, skills they want—and connect with others around skills they want to share with each other. I'm biased, but I think it's beautiful. It has a pretty darn good population on it already, considering that it just went into beta within the last few months. It's a brand new website. There was an awful lot of work done on the front end, trying to figure out what people wanted that would be different from what already exists and challenging some of our own assumptions, like the mentor-mentee relationship, challenging our own assumptions about what was required.

I think this is another thing that was a little bit of a surprise. The other part of that funding has supported a number of face-to-face workshops and workshop series. We have an HR inclusion workshop coming up to talk about HR professionals, about ways to combat bias, really high-quality stuff that's brought to us by the WinSETT Centre. We're working with it. Because we are able to do these sort of face-to-face mini-conference or workshop opportunities, it's a way to actually build capacity in terms of mentorship, having conversations about women in diverse fields, or gender diversity in various fields, I guess, in general. So the other piece of it is the face-to-face component.

Given how many mentorship programs there are, and how many girls in science and girls in tech programs there are—so many of them—the long span of the program and the substance of it, has allowed us to partner with other groups and to really figure out who those partnerships are. WWEST, west coast women in engineering, science, and technology, the local NSERC chair in women in science and engineering.... We've been able to pull all those groups together and collaborate on projects. The data sheets that I keep flipping to are a co-production with WWEST. The workshops are a co-production with the people at WinSETT. The SCWIST outreach programs are plugged into Make Possible. We have a networking evening, a huge one, for undergraduate women, and it's plugged into the Make Possible network as well. That's what the funding has allowed us to do: integrate locally. It would be awesome if we could integrate in a larger way. I think we'd be able to share best practices a lot better.