Thank you. That's a fantastic question. Thank you for being such a pioneer on that front.
It is definitely difficult in many ways to be a woman in science, even today. The biggest pinch point that I see isn't so much at the student level, where even up to the Ph.D. there are relatively large numbers of women participating. However, the big pinch point, and the one that I'm currently facing, is that move from the Ph.D. into either industry or into the post-doctoral fellowships.
Of note, women only hold about 35% of NSERC's post-doctoral fellowship awards. Only about 37% of the applicants applying for those are women. There's a huge drop-off in that. Part of that comes from years and years of higher tuition and higher costs of living, but the awards and the stipends offered to students are stagnant, essentially. In particular, the CGS master's and the PGS D doctoral awards haven't changed in value since 2003 and they're below the poverty line.
By the time people such as myself are reaching the end of a Ph.D., with years of spending lots of tuition money, we have no savings backed up. You get to that point where there just isn't that option to stay funded in that kind of career trajectory. A huge part of it is investing in those sorts of opportunities, particularly at the post-doctoral level, to try to increase the participation of women—