Status of Women committee  The challenge is that not all employers are under the federal mandate. That is a really good precedent, but a precedent needs to move faster to impact other places. The other thing that's important to remember is that there are lots of loopholes on paper, again, to pay women less.

Status of Women committee  Madam Chair, through you, we need to let these women do the work they're qualified to do and pay them equitably. That part is not complicated. We need to be clear that this is what we are going for. We are not looking for women to just survive. We don't want immigrant women to say that they are just doing this for their children and that the fact that they were doctors or engineers in their home country means nothing.

Status of Women committee  Madam Chair, through you, I want to clarify that not all STEM jobs are regulated. The credential recognition isn't just with the regulatory bodies. It is employers believing that these women can do the job they are doing. To also address something a member raised before, when immigrants apply here, they can't come to Canada without submitting extensive documentation about their qualifications.

Status of Women committee  Thank you. Madam Chair, through you, I will raise two points related to that. I think that when it comes to immigrant women and STEM, prearrival programs and government support of those programs are really underutilized. You want people to go through some of this credentialing work while they're in their home countries and they have a support network.

Status of Women committee  Thank you. The same woman told me that they had moved to Botswana from Congo to work as doctors. They had a three-month course where what was specific about the system in Botswana was taught to them. They had to write a test. It was three months and then they were working. Her question to me was, “I don't know what Canada wants from me.

Status of Women committee  I have noticed that people really love giving women advice, generally speaking. What I'm hearing from my colleagues in this room is that we want to follow that up with specific actions that they can take on their own terms. To me that is really vital. We can't have policies designed to help women when the women are not involved in designing them materially.

Status of Women committee  Thank you. The change that we require has the shape of jobs, but really it's cultural change. Part of culture lives in our institutions. When I hear about women having trouble getting into their fields of work.... By the way, they came to Canada through an application that said that this is what they do.

Status of Women committee  All right. Thank you for the question. I am reluctant to share one success story, because immigrant women are often held to a higher standard and told that they have to be exceptional just to get the same treatment that everyone else does. If you're an immigrant woman, you are both invisible, as in you go into a room and are not counted—most people don't know that immigrant women are the majority—and you are hyper-visible.

Status of Women committee  Thank you, Madam Chair. As you said, my name is Saadia Muzaffar, and I'm the founder and president of TechGirls Canada, or TGC, which is a national not-for-profit that's in its 11th year of advancing a STEM economy where women thrive. We conduct research and capacity-building pilots to identify better ways to not only increase women's participation in STEM-led innovation sectors but also focus on how they fare in terms of promotion and pay equity once they get their first jobs in the areas of their training and expertise.