Canadian Heritage Committee on Oct. 4th, 2016

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

I'd like to call the meeting to order.

As you know, pursuant to Standing Order 108(2), this committee is doing a study of Canadian women and girls in sport.

I would like to welcome the witnesses.

We have witnesses who are here as individuals, and some are with associations. Generally speaking, we give everyone 10 minutes to present. If you can do it in less than 10 minutes, that's great. Then we go to a question and answer interactive session.

We may have to cut the time to five minutes because there are so many of you.

We have some individuals starting in the first part, Dr. Diane Culver, associate professor, School of Human Kinetics, University of Ottawa; Dr. Guylaine Demers, professor, department of physical education, Université Laval; and Dr. Gretchen Kerr, professor and vice-dean of the Faculty of Kinesiology and Physical Education at the University of Toronto.

Each of you can have five minutes to present the salient points, and then we will open up to a question and answer session.

Let's start with Dr. Culver.

[Dr. Diane Culver, Associate Professor, School of Human Kinetics, University of Ottawa, As an Individual]

Good morning, everybody.

Thank you very much for inviting us to present on this topic, which is of course very important to us.

As a bit about my background, I was an athlete. I was on the Canadian National Ski Team many years ago, and then went on to be a coach at all levels, including at the national and Olympic level for Canada and then for New Zealand. I have about 20 years of experience. It was hard to keep a career as a high-performance Alpine ski coach and also have a family, so I decided to go back to university. I didn't think I was going to be there for 10 years, but I ended up in my position as an associate professor with a specialization in coach development.

You have a lot of stats, and so. I'm not going to speak very much to the stats because I think some of the other witnesses will. I am going to focus on women in coaching and particularly the theory that I have been working with for the last 15 years, which is social learning theory, that has to do with learning in safe social spaces, and I'll explain a little bit about what that is.

I'm going to talk to you about how we have some evidence that this is a useful approach to supporting women in coaching. I will also present some of the solutions we feel could easily be implemented.

Why is this important? It's because retention and recruitment are important for women coaches. You'll see that there is a low percentage of women coaches. Women have different ways of knowing, they work more collaboratively, and they have different communication styles. They have something different to contribute to the athletes and to the world of sport.

Also, if we have more women role models in coaching, then that means we can encourage more women and girls to get into both the sport and into leadership roles.

If we have mothers coaching more, particularly at the community level, that will encourage more girls to participate, which is also a problem.

Finally, if our female elite athletes, in whom we have invested so much, wish to go into coaching, then we would be able to support them to stay there.

I will give you some definitions related to social learning spaces. What is a social learning space? It can be anything from a one-on-one conversation to a group of people who are all working around the same practice. It can include your networks, conferences, workshops, etc.

I have some evidence from a recent study we did. We looked all over North America. We didn't find any examples of what we considered to be communities of practice in Canada in coaching, but we found in the NCAA, the American collegiate association, something that they call “loop groups”, which met the definition of communities of practice.

In the handout, you can see some of the quotations from this qualitative study exploring what this did for these women to participate in this supportive group, which met about once a month. It included all people coaching women in their respective universities. There actually was one man involved, but it was mostly women, and there were all different sports.

The first one talks about knowing that you're not alone and having a safe zone to realize that you have support if you want it whereas normally you'd just be working away in your office and with your athletes.

The other one is very important because the woman says she had thought about starting a family in the next few years, but thought that would be the end of her coaching career. Being in this group showed her that she could in fact be both a mother and a successful coach. Now she's not worried about that.

The last one is from a very experienced coach who was really surprised. She didn't realize how much support younger newer coaches coming in needed. She thought that it would come from personnel. In fact, these kinds of groups allow you to have some support from outside where you won't be judged and where it won't be thought that you're not able to do your job because you need advice on facing certain challenges.

Women coaches lack a network. This comes out of our meeting in Quebec City, Conversation 2015, which Dr. Demers organized.

What can we do to help this?

We can use communities of practice as a form of continuing development, which is required to remain certified as a coach. We have some examples already. There's one going on right now with wheelchair curling, which is not specifically with women coaches. We've also done one with Special Olympics. We can also leverage the existing Canada Games apprenticeship program and move that online. These are low-cost solutions. We just use existing platforms that we have. We can use these social learning spaces to spread great stories about women leadership in sport and help elite female athletes who want to go into coaching.

A second problem is to increase the number of coaches, which you'll probably hear about later on. Similarly, we need to support these female athletes when they want to go into coaching. We need to offer all-woman coaching clinics. We also need to offer clinics to the men who are in the coaching world about coaching women and about working with women coaches.

The third issue would be around making it a viable career for women. This speaks to that quotation of the woman in the NCAA study who thought she could not be a coach and a mother at the same time.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

Dr. Culver, you need to wrap up, please. I'm so sorry.

[Dr. Diane Culver]

I'm finishing.

I won't read those because you have it on the paper, but essentially what I'm recommending is that we use this low-cost solution to formally introduce a role of social learning leadership to support women. It will also be for general leadership roles, but in particular it's for coaching.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

Thank you very much.

Now I think we're going to have Madame Demers.

Perhaps you can begin for five minutes, please.

[Dr. Guylaine Demers, Professor, Department of Physical Education, Université Laval, As an Individual]

Thank you for having me. I am going to speak in French, my mother tongue.

Ms. Culver referred to Conversation 2015. Last summer, in June 2015, I and two other colleagues you will hear this afternoon, Penny Werthner and Marion Lay, organized the fourth national Women and Sport conference. The previous conference had taken place in 1996, so that was a long time between the two conferences. The 2015 conference enabled us to identify a large number of solutions, some of which are not expensive, as Ms. Culver pointed out.

My part of the presentation relates mainly to women in leadership positions. There are coaches, of course, but I am going to speak, rather, about women who hold positions in administration, such as executive directors, technical directors, presidents, and so on.

In the documents I have distributed to you, you will find the latest statistics published by the Canadian Association for the Advancement of Woman and Sport and Physical Activity. Those statistics show that the higher you go in the hierarchy, the fewer women there are. Only 10 or 12 or 13% of president positions are held by women, while 15 to 20% of executive director positions are held by women.

The problem is that those numbers seem to be set in stone. They do not budge. We know the numbers, we repeat them constantly, we bring them out, and there are studies: they do not budge.

I worked closely on writing the 2009 policy on sport for women and girls. By the way, a lot of people do not know that in Canada, we have a policy on sport for women. We believed it was very important that this policy have teeth, but it does not have any. As a result, there has been no follow-up on our lovely recommendations and all the work we did.

Marion Lay, who will be with you this afternoon, has been repeating the same message for 40 years. She is a woman of great perseverance. Let us hope that this time, her message will be heard.

I want to talk about three problems in particular. First, the policies do not include any accountability. They are there, but if someone does not abide by them, there are no consequences.

Second, there is no system that prepares women to achieve leadership roles. Often, there is just one woman, and we throw her into the arena and hope that everything will work out. This means there is a lot of pressure on her. We have to prepare these women to fill decision-making positions in the sports system, to be comfortable and to be able to stay there.

Third, we are very concerned about the pipeline. Where is the next generation? Where are the girls who will move into the sports system?

If I look around me here this morning, and not wanting to insult girls, I see only women aged 50 and over. Where is the next generation? This is one of the problems we are concerned about.

The first very concrete solution we have, as a number of people have told you today, is accountability. There has to be accountability if we are putting so much effort into developing policies or programs. If they are not adhered to, there have to be consequences, but if they are adhered to and progress is made, that will be recognized and assistance will be given.

The financial aspect is important, clearly. If my budget does not budge, whether or not I abide by the policy, there are no consequences. We observe that there is always some priority other than women, and we have the history to remind us. Whether we are talking about 1970, when we held the first conference of the 1970s, or 2002, when we hosted the international conference, the same message kept coming back: the policy has to have teeth; there has to be a commitment alongside it that comes from above and makes its way down. We need a top-down approach.

There also has to be oversight. We have to check whether progress is being made. You should have seen the network that was set in motion for today's exercise. Where are the numbers? How many women are there, precisely? Exactly where are they?

We have to search and dig to get the data. It is not reasonable not to be able to find statistics quickly. There absolutely has to be an oversight system so we know who is doing well, who is doing less well, whether our policies and actions are bearing fruit, and whether or not our efforts have had an impact. At present, we do not know.

What is also missing, in the system that prepares women, is networking. Women have to be able to help each other. We also have to look outside the world of sport. There are organizations doing good work to help women access leadership positions. I am thinking about the business world and health care. We have to look outside the world of sport precisely to take inspiration from best practices, and not have to reinvent the wheel. A lot of things are being done, but we do not even know it is being done.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

Dr. Demers, I'm very sorry. You have about three seconds remaining.

[Dr. Guylaine Demers]

Okay: so I'll have time for questions.

This time, there have to be repercussions if things are to change, please.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

Thank you very much.

I want to welcome Senator Nancy Ruth to the listening audience today.

Dr. Kerr, you have five minutes.

[Dr. Gretchen Kerr, Professor, Vice-Dean, Faculty of Kinesiology and Physical Education, University of Toronto, As an Individual]

Thank you very much.

There's nothing more challenging than trying to get an academic to speak for only five minutes.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

Try a politician.

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

[Dr. Gretchen Kerr]

Well, we're in good company, then.

I'll focus in this presentation on one sector of the Canadian sport system, which is the Canadian Interuniversity Sport system. This is otherwise known as the CIS, Canadian Interuniversity Sport. This is the national governing body for university sport. There are 55 universities participating. It's a highly competitive league that contributes members to our Olympic and world championship teams.

It's an important context to examine, because it's perhaps the only one that involves full-time, paid coaches. It's also important because sport is perhaps the only sector of society left that's sex-segregated, with male and female teams. This brings an additional responsibility to the sport world to achieve gender equity.

What's the current state of affairs? Across the university system, just to give you some context, females make up 56% of the general student population at universities. There is an equal number of teams for male and female sports, but for head coaching positions across the universities, only 17% are female. Perhaps more importantly, this number is a decrease from 2011, and another decrease from earlier in the 2000s. The basic message is that we're losing ground, and it wasn't great to start with.

It also bears mentioning that we have no shortage of data. There's a tremendous amount of data on the percentage of coaches across the Canadian sport system, so we've done that homework. Where do we go from here? First of all, we need a commitment, a commitment that comes with targets and measurable benchmarks, whether this is increasing the number of female coaches, decreasing the attrition from those who are within the field, or increasing their job satisfaction.

One solution that's been recommended is the NFL's Rooney rule, which you may have heard of. It was brought in to address the fact that there were so many black football athletes but no black coaches or sport administrators. The Rooney rule said that you must interview minority candidates. Over time, this expanded to a requirement to interview women for sport administration positions. This has made a significant impact on changing the culture of football.

There are other ways in which we can change this commitment into action. It includes everything from education about unconscious bias to appealing to highly competitive female athletes who at the moment, research indicates, do not perceive coaching to be a viable career option. We need to do something about that. We need to go beyond mentoring and sponsor women by opening doors for them, advocating for them to move up the sport system.

Very importantly, we have to do something about the accountability toward policies. The Canadian Interuniversity Sport system has a gender equity policy with various details laid out around athlete participation and coaching. This policy, like many others, has not been revisited in the past 12 years. There is little evidence that there is any data management or monitoring. Very importantly, there is a lack of accountability. There are currently some excellent programs and policies in place. It's the accountability piece that seems to be where things fall apart. One recommendation to deal with this is to link gender equity and the details of the policies to the funding received by sport organizations.

In conclusion, this CIS system, where we find the most full-time paid coaches, has fewer than 20% female coaches despite a 56% female university student population.

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

Thank you very much, Dr. Kerr.

Now we begin the question and answer period. This is a seven-minute round, which means that the seven minutes include the question and the answer.

We're going to begin with Ms. Dabrusin from the Liberals, who, by the way, is the person who brought forward this motion to the committee.

[Julie Dabrusin, Liberal, Toronto—Danforth, ON]

Thank you.

I'd like to start by thanking all of you for appearing and for all your work in this area. I'm very excited to start this study today.

I want to note that October is Women's History Month in Canada, so it's worth noting over the course of the study women who've done so much in sport. One name that comes to mind is that of Abby Hoffman, who did so much. I'm hoping that through this study we will get to highlight a whole bunch of other women who have been so important in this area.

I am a mother of two girls. I coached ball hockey for several years because a friend encouraged me, and I picked up ice hockey at the age of 40. I see how it's important, and I've seen a lot of the challenges along the way.

Today all of you focused a lot on women in leadership roles and on coaching, but can you talk about issues of participation? I see that the 2015 conference in Quebec included as a theme the poor participation of girls in sports, and also, I guess, limited media coverage, and some other issues. I was wondering if you could highlight some of those other issues.

[Dr. Guylaine Demers]

The five issues were around media, girls' participation, homophobia in sport, women coaches, and women in leadership positions.

On girls' participation in particular, the numbers show that girls are dropping out of sport by the end of primary school, and in high school, that's dramatic. It's all about peer pressure and the media, and the images they get about what is a good girl and what you should look like. They drop out of sports because they feel they're not competent enough, or they feel that at that age it's time to look nice and beautiful, not too sporty, because we're not expecting that from them.

One of the problems that relates to this is those people who work with girls but don't know the girls. Who are the girls coming into their gym or into their pool? Girls have not been socialized in the same way as boys. They haven't had the same chances to develop their motor skills, so they don't feel competent, and they drop out of sport very early.

[Julie Dabrusin, Liberal, Toronto—Danforth, ON]

Maybe I'll put it to the other two. Have you seen any good solutions proposed in other studies along the way in terms of that issue of how you maintain female participation in sports?

[Dr. Gretchen Kerr]

In answer to that question, I'll add that there's a lot to be learned from other sectors outside of sport. It's well known that we are less likely to become what we can't see, so when young girls are going into sport and are coached by males in more of a male style, that certainly has been documented as a barrier to keeping girls in sport. There are many others, but that's one.

[Julie Dabrusin, Liberal, Toronto—Danforth, ON]

There's one thing that I wanted to follow up on with you, Dr. Kerr. One of the things we were looking at is that the last time this committee looked at this issue of women in girls in sport, it was 1998, and there were a number of recommendations made. We're going to find out a little more about what has happened with those.

One of them was that:

The Government of Canada, as a major funder of the new system of national sport centres, enact three criteria for ongoing funding; significant representation by women on the boards of directors; programming that serves the unique needs of women and the other underrepresented groups; and higher numbers of apprenticeship and employment opportunities for women coaches.

Seeing that this recommendation was there, what do you think about that? You talked about linking funding to women in leadership. What do you think about that? Have you ever seen that actually put into action? What we can do?

[Dr. Gretchen Kerr]

I should preface the answer by saying that some of the speakers you will hear from at noon will address some of these other topics. We tried not to overlap too much.

There was a tremendous number of initiatives in response to the 1998 report. Not all of them have been sustained since then. One thing that we know across the board, not just in sport, is that when there are economic challenges at a broader level, the programs that tend to disappear are those for women and children.

There are policies that have not been enacted because there hasn't been funding. I think it's also a resource issue in terms of holding people accountable to what was written in such documents as the 1998 report.

[Julie Dabrusin, Liberal, Toronto—Danforth, ON]

Do either of you have other ideas about that recommendation and linking funding to leadership?

[Dr. Guylaine Demers]

At the NCI in Montreal, at its birth, it was decided right up front in the bylaws to have on its board a 60/40 balance, either 60% female and 40% male, or vice versa.

When we talk about having quotas or having those numbers for equity in representation on boards, usually we hear the answer, “Well, we can't find any women; there are not enough women who are interested or there are not enough competent women.” To that I reply, “So all the men there are competent?” That's my answer.

We find those women. When it's there, you make the effort. Most of the time, if you don't have to, you don't make the effort. Then it's easy to say there are no women or they are not interested. In fact, when you have that in the bylaws, as we have had since 2008, it works. We have amazing women on the board now because it was right there, right up front at the beginning, and nobody questioned that. So we do have some examples like that and it's working. There are women out there who want to do that.

[Julie Dabrusin, Liberal, Toronto—Danforth, ON]

I'll just put it out there.

I know Canada Games had quite a policy. Maybe somewhere along the way you can bring something out about the Canada Games strategy for encouraging women to participate.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

Thank you, Ms. Dabrusin.

Now we'll go to Mr. Kitchen from the Conservatives, for seven minutes, please.

[Robert Gordon Kitchen, Conservative, Souris—Moose Mountain, SK]

Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you all for coming today and for your very interesting presentation. I wish we could have more time.

I come from a kinesiology degree background from the University of Waterloo, probably one of the original kinesiology programs. It shows how old I am. I also have been a coach for many years and involved as a team doctor not only for the summer Canada Games and provincial summer games, but also coaching.

So I'm very interested, and I'm glad to hear you talk about coaching and participation. I've coached both male and female teams over the years and I've always found that as a coach, it's a totally different mindset when I'm coaching girls versus coaching boys. Part of the issue I see is that it's a question, especially at the young age, of getting girls participating in sport. It's not only the girls, because the girls have an interest in it, but it's really the parents and getting the parents to recognize that it's not only a health benefit but also a social benefit to have them involved, getting them to participate and the women to participate, not only the mothers participating in helping with the organization but also coaching and officiating. To start, I think those are important things that we need.

I wonder if all three of you could comment on where you see the parent's role in this process. I will start with Dr. Culver.