Status of Women committee  Thank you very much.

Status of Women committee  Thank you. I appreciate this opportunity to make a submission to the Standing Committee on the Status of Women. I'm representing the Canadian Centre for Women in Science, Engineering Trades and Technology, and also WISEST, at the University of Alberta. For 30 years now, since

Status of Women committee  I'm sorry, what did you say?

Status of Women committee  Thank you. Those workshops help to make the workplace respectful and inclusive. To sum up, the factors we are working on through WISEST and the WinSETT Centre are to provide hands-on experience to girls in areas in engineering, science, and the trades that they might not choo

Status of Women committee  The young girls should have the opportunity to meet with aboriginal women who are already in the professions and the trades. We had a group of young aboriginal girls we were talking with about being in the trades, and we brought in a woman who was aboriginal and who was a carpent

Status of Women committee  One of the things that we have found, and we have for a number of years now, is first nations girls coming to the WISEST program—the one I was talking about where they come and spend six weeks at the university—from a distance are quite hard for us to keep in touch with and to co

Status of Women committee  Yes, we are doing that. We find that about half of them are coming back and going into...well, into engineering. The work that we've started with the girls in trades is more recent. Having young women come into the summer program, we started that in 2000, so it's ten years old, b

Status of Women committee  Yes, I believe it would be. We notice a very large difference between the high school for aboriginal girls that we have in the city of Edmonton at Amiskwaciy Academy and the girls who come from schools that are on reserves or are remote. The background of their education is very

Status of Women committee  Yes. So often in the schools in the city there is a specialized teacher for each area, so they're getting biology from someone who is well trained in biology and they're learning physics from someone who has a physics background. When you go to rural schools as well as schools

Status of Women committee  Yes, that's right.

Status of Women committee  Yes, indeed. This is one of our major concerns. We're working with the provincial professional engineer associations, as well as Engineers Canada. There are two concerns here. One is yes, women who have children sometimes leave the profession and don't come back. Moving to somet

Status of Women committee  I'm absolutely committed to allowing people to make choices. But they only make choices if they're informed. Obviously I would never have chosen to be a mechanical engineer, because I didn't know what a mechanical engineer did when I was growing up. What we're trying to do is p

Status of Women committee  I very much appreciate this opportunity to make a presentation in front of the standing committee on behalf of the Canadian Centre for Women in Science, Engineering, Trades and Technology. Because that's quite a mouthful, we call it the WinSETT Centre. The centre works in partne

Status of Women committee  Yes, I am aware of Bill C-25. I certainly agree that this is critical for the Canadian economy: increasing the diversity of management and board teams. There's so much evidence now of the difference that makes to the effectiveness of the company, whatever it's doing.

Status of Women committee  I agree with the kinds of comments that have been made by Tamara: that we need to collect the data so people recognize what's going on, so people recognize that there are so few female CEOs of engineering and technical-related companies, for example. That has to be made available