Status of Women committee  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

Status of Women committee  We've actually done quite a bit of work on this through our Women in Engineering work. One of the things that we've identified as a big problem is exactly what you've talked about, which is the culture of the faculties of the engineering programs in schools. It starts with frosh

Status of Women committee  The challenges that we have in the engineering world vary to some degree from one particular engineering discipline to the next because they're different work environments from one engineering discipline to the next. As an example, in biomedical and environmental engineering fiel

Status of Women committee  Absolutely. I think we really need to figure out what it is that's steering girls away from maths and sciences in high school. Is it because it's perceived as boring? Perhaps if they had a technology program, hands on, it would be a lot more exciting.

Status of Women committee  Me too, but my guidance counsellor thought I should be a psychologist, and those who know me understand that it would have been a bad choice.

Status of Women committee  The only reason I wanted to start is that one of the comments I'd like to make is that the province of Quebec has really led the way with having programs in place that help women. They led the way on maternity leave. They're leading the way now on child care, and I would hazard t

Status of Women committee  Absolutely.

Status of Women committee  Oh, yes, we've done a tremendous amount. We've had huge support from the federal government, from HRSDC. We started a big project in 2002, “From Consideration to Integration”. What we've been able to achieve with our regulators, our constituent associations, has been a much more

Status of Women committee  Absolutely. The more media that's focused on people like Julie Payette, for example, as a successful engineer encourages girls and women to go into the professions. Any positive image is always good.

Status of Women committee  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 diff

Status of Women committee  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.

Human Resources committee  Thank you very much. I do appreciate being invited to come and speak to you. As indicated, my name is Marie Carter. I'm actually this week the interim chief executive officer, so I'm wearing two hats at the moment. Engineers Canada is the national body that represents the 12 re

Human Resources committee  Absolutely, yes. The 6% that I referred to is only the increase in women. From the perspective of women, 50% of our population, really, is untapped. From the perspective of the whole aboriginal issue, we entered into an agreement with the Assembly of First Nations to try to work

Human Resources committee  Exactly. When we got the results of that, I thought, well, you know, you're not going to have any engineers with five to ten years of experience if you're not hiring the people out of university, because in five or ten years, they're the ones who will have the experience that you

Human Resources committee  My understanding is that it really crosses all disciplines. However, it depends on what area of the country you're looking at. For example, in Alberta and in Newfoundland, where they have a lot of work going on in the gas and oil industry and where they have a lot of construction