Science and Research Committee on Sept. 20th, 2023

[Cherie Wong]

I am very lucky. I have a very supportive group of professors and students around me, but I don't think that many of my colleagues have had similar experiences. Students have expressed that they are worried that they're not going to get certain scholarships in Canada because their views may differ from the views of the professors who are issuing the grants. This is a particular worry for individuals like me who are working in sociology. My research is focused on transnational repression, so it's quite sensitive in that sense. If I were to apply for a research grant, I would worry that, if a professor has pro-Beijing views, I would not get a scholarship issued to me. I think that's a very similar experience for individuals in the soft sciences when they are applying for scholarships and grants for their own research.

[Lena Metlege Diab, Liberal, Halifax West, NS]

Thank you for that.

Professor Houlden, you're in Alberta. I know you hold many hats, but what have you seen from your perspective in that province, for example?

[Gordon Houlden]

Well, I can speak about the provinces more generally because I did a survey in the course of preparing my study for the Government of Alberta this year.

There are a couple of things. Number one I may have already mentioned, which is that the bulk of the research funding is not from the federal government. The federal government can come up with a whole set of criteria and be absolutely rigid, but the material may still be going out the door. What's needed.... The provinces, except for the largest provinces.... Quebec, Ontario and B.C.—perhaps Alberta—may have the resources to do analysis as to the security risks. However, this is being done to the tune of billions of dollars of taxpayers' money by the federal government, agencies such as CSIS, CSE and other agencies of government.

To me, the answer is not 13 security agencies doing analysis. The answer is close collaboration between provinces and the federal government, sharing knowledge and coming up with common approaches. That, to me, is the best. Otherwise, if one province is tough and another is lenient, for example, foreign governments or agencies or individuals will go to the place of least resistance and take advantage of that slacker attitude. It's only if you have a unified national view of universities that's adopted with the full support of the provinces, in my view, that there's—

[Lena Metlege Diab, Liberal, Halifax West, NS]

I can't agree with you more. Do you see that happening at any level?

[Gordon Houlden]

Everything in federal-provincial relations is difficult, and I accept that, but I would have given up decades ago if I thought that was the case. The provinces and the federal government can still collaborate, and it's in their interest to do so.

As for individual provinces, some will be more forward than others. I'm not saying it's a question of simply taking direction from Ottawa. It's a means of sitting down on organized committees that meet on a regular basis to come up with common approaches, to share those approaches, to frustrate our enemies and to promote our interests.

[Lena Metlege Diab, Liberal, Halifax West, NS]

That's terrific. Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Lloyd Longfield]

That's great. Thank you very much. That was a great discussion.

Now for two and a half minutes, go ahead, please, Mr. Blanchette-Joncas.

[Maxime Blanchette-Joncas, Bloc, Rimouski-Neigette—Témiscouata—Les Basques, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I'll continue with my questions for Professor Houlden.

You mentioned earlier that we should be concerned about Chinese interference in scientific research in Canada. I asked you how we compare with other countries. We know that the U.K., the U.S. and the Netherlands, in particular, have already taken steps to stop China's interference.

How do you think we compare to other OECD and G7 countries?

Could we adopt good practices here that are being done elsewhere?

[Gordon Houlden]

Are we talking about research security here or political interference?

[Maxime Blanchette-Joncas, Bloc, Rimouski-Neigette—Témiscouata—Les Basques, QC]

I'm talking about national security for research partnerships.

[Gordon Houlden]

Right. Thank you.

We can always learn from our counterparts. I was a Canadian official for many years, but I never thought that the things Canadians did were always necessarily the very best. I wanted to find the best from elsewhere.

Some of those countries you've mentioned are of a scale that is more applicable to us—be it the Netherlands or even France or the U.K. The U.S. is in many ways a special case. Australia is an interesting case. All of these countries, with the partial exception of the United States, are quite new to this game. If we go back a decade, we find that particularly vis-à-vis collaboration and co-operation with China, there were very few concerns. Yes, if something was on our export control list, then that's fine. If it was a weapons system, then fine, but apart from that.... What's happening now, though, is that so much research is dual-use. That which can be put to civilian use may also have a military application in communications or a range of things.

I would say we should study carefully what the Netherlands has done. Germany is doing some very interesting things, actually starting even just this summer in terms of tightening the controls. The tightening, I'd emphasize, for each of those countries, as well as for the EU, does not mean no collaboration with China. It means having eyes wide open, doing careful collaboration and looking at where this Chinese researcher is working, at which agency and also at the subject matter. If in doubt, say no and perhaps go elsewhere.

Some of this would require legislation. If you're actually going to force academics not to collaborate with certain entities, you can use the carrot of money, even in federal-provincial things, but actually forbidding a professor from collaborating with a foreign entity would require a whole other degree of intervention that we don't have the tools for right now.

[The Chair, Liberal, Lloyd Longfield]

Thank you very much.

You mentioned the universities. When Canada U15 and U15 Germany met this summer, I was able to take part in those discussions, and part of our discussion was around security.

I'll turn it over to Richard Cannings for the last two and half minutes on this panel.

[Richard Cannings, NDP, South Okanagan—West Kootenay, BC]

Thank you.

I'll stay with Professor Houlden on that last topic about how we manage researchers and research.

If there is a researcher getting significant funding directly from a Chinese entity or any other country, is that where you find we would have to have some sort of legislation to regulate that? If so, where would that legislation live? Would it be federal or provincial?

I'm just curious. It seems a bit of a mess.

[Gordon Houlden]

Thank you very much, Mr. Cannings.

It would be a departure from our normal procedure. One of the great strengths, as in that MIT study, is the open nature of science in the United States and Canada. I think you have to tread carefully if you're going to come in with a legislative hammer on universities, which have lots of good reasons to want to be independent and autonomous.

I would rather argue that funding coming in really matters on the question of the subject matter. If the Chinese are helping the Canadian.... I happen to know a couple of researchers at the University of Alberta who came up, sometimes with their Chinese collaborators, with a vaccine for hepatitis C that will save, say, hundreds of thousands and perhaps millions of lives. I don't think I really care where that money came from.

If the subject matter is a cutting-edge dual-use matter, that's another thing, and I think that's where it would probably have to be a mix of federal and provincial legislation. I know how sensitive the provinces are, quite legitimately, about education being in their domain. This would be a diplomatic and legislative nightmare, but don't let the perfect get in the way of the good. Sensitizing universities, sensitizing the researchers and sensitizing parliamentarians and the public has advantages and risks, and it is a mix of both—absolutely a mix of both.

One of the great strengths in the MIT study, if you choose to read it, is that it points out how few U.S. scientists have been graduated compared to China, but the secret sauce that the Americans have and that Canada has is all this great talent we harvest from overseas. Chinese, Indian, Iranian and even Russian researcher students come to us and bring their knowledge to us. That's one of the ways we make up for that lack of enough internal candidates for top research jobs.

[The Chair, Liberal, Lloyd Longfield]

That's great. Thank you very much.

This has been a fascinating discussion this afternoon. I wish we could go on, but we are at time.

Thank you to our witnesses—Benjamin Fung, Cherie Wong, and Gordon Houlden, who is the director emeritus of the China Institute at the University of Alberta. I can see that your service is very valuable not only to them but to our country, so thank you for your service there.

You can submit any information that might have arisen from our discussion today to our clerk, and she'll get it to the analysts. The analysts have assured me that they can find the MIT report that's been referenced a few times here, but if there's any other information, please do send it on.

We'll be suspending briefly so our next panel can come together. We have three witnesses via video conference, who will have to be tested out.

I'll ask the witnesses here to sign out. Thank you for coming. Thank you for signing in and being part of this valuable discussion.

[Gordon Houlden]

Thank you, and goodbye.

[The Chair, Liberal, Lloyd Longfield]

Welcome back.

Pursuant to Standing Order 108(3)(i) and the motion adopted by the committee on Monday, December 5, 2022, the committee commences its study on the long-term impacts of pay gaps experienced by different genders and equity-seeking groups among faculty at Canadian universities.

We're having a bit of a technical start-up. I can see that one of our witnesses has just rejoined us. Hopefully, the reboot of the computer has worked.

We have two individuals who will be presenting together. It has been agreed to share the time over 10 minutes at the beginning. They are Tracy Smith-Carrier, Canada research chair, tier 2, in advancing the UN sustainable development goals, Royal Roads University, by video conference, and Marcie Penner, associate professor, department of psychology, King’s University College, Western University, by video conference.

Also on video conference, we have Visions of Science, represented by Dina Al-khooly, senior director, impact and learning.

Each of you will have five minutes. As I said, the two people as individuals will be working together on sharing 10 minutes between them.

If you're ready to start, maybe I could turn it over to Ms. Al-khooly or Ms. Smith-Carrier, whoever is starting.

[Dr. Tracy Smith-Carrier, Canada Research Chair (Tier 2) in Advancing the UN Sustainable Development Goals, Royal Roads University, As an Individual]

Thank you very much.

Good afternoon. We are grateful to the House of Commons Standing Committee on Science and Research for inviting us to present today and for facilitating this important discussion.

My name is Tracy Smith-Carrier. I am an associate professor in the School of Humanitarian Studies at Royal Roads University in Victoria, B.C., and the Canada research chair in advancing the UN sustainable development goals. I am here with my colleague Dr. Marcie Penner, associate professor in the department of psychology at King’s University College at Western University.

Dr. Penner and I have collaborated to conduct research on pay equity in academia, including publishing a paper on the long-term implications of the gender pay and pension gap on faculty at Canadian universities.

[Marcie Penner, Associate Professor, Department of Psychology, King’s University College, Western University, As an Individual]

There is a substantial and persistent gender pay gap for faculty at Canadian universities. According to Statistics Canada, in 2023, full-time women faculty earned 7.4% less on average for the same work. The gender pay gap varied by institution, ranging from $150 a year to almost $25,000 a year, reflecting a gender pay gap of 0% to 15%.

Momani and colleagues demonstrated that pay gaps also vary by discipline—gender gaps are larger in STEM fields—and showed that the gender pay gap widens as women advance in academia and doubles for women who are deans.

The Canadian Association of University Teachers quantified diversity pay gaps for indigenous and racialized faculty, as well as looking at the intersection with gender. Using 2016 census data, they showed that indigenous university faculty, both men and women, earn 26% less than non-racialized men faculty. CAUT also found that racialized university faculty on average earned 12% less than faculty overall. There was a diversity pay gap for university faculty across all racialized groups, ranging from 3% to 28%. Moreover, the gender pay gap for racialized women faculty in Canada was double that for non-racialized women.

Many Canadian universities have used salary anomaly studies to investigate the gender pay gap at their institutions and have made positive salary adjustments either across the board to all women faculty or on an individual basis. These salary adjustments have not been retroactive at any university. Salary anomaly studies and salary corrections have been driven by collective bargaining between faculty associations and university employers rather than through legislation. Pay gaps still exist at universities, even after multiple rounds of adjustments, because without addressing a systemic bias that leads to pay differences, the gap is reintroduced in starting salaries and promotion and merit decisions.

[Dr. Tracy Smith-Carrier]

Four factors contribute to the gender wage gap in universities: disparities in starting salaries, differentials in performance and merit pay, differences in the rates of and times to promotion, and incongruities related to parental and other caregiving leaves. Although collective agreements identify salary floors for specific academic ranks, starting salaries largely continue to be negotiated, interpreted by university administrators who may or may not be cognizant of implicit gender bias. Women's experience and performance/merit are often undervalued in academic and other settings. Research has shown that in experiments where an identical resumé is presented, but either with a typical man's name or with a typical woman’s name, the candidates with a man's name are judged as more competent and are offered a higher starting salary.

When applying to a national research council for funding, women need more than twice the academic output of men to receive the same competency score. Moreover, men's earnings rise significantly with academic productivity, whereas women's do not. Men are also more likely to be promoted, and women who are promoted take longer, on average, to be promoted than men, despite research that confirms that women are just as likely as men to ask for promotions and raises.

The take-up of parental and caregiving leave has further punitive effects that impact when women start their careers, the breaks they accumulate over their careers, and the decisions they make about when and whether to seek promotion.

[Marcie Penner]

The gender pay gap clearly has long-term financial implications for women professors across their careers and retirements, but the cumulative impact has not previously been reported. In our research in collaboration with Dr. Aaron Cecala—now at Brescia University College—and Dr. Carol Agocs from Western University, we estimated the combined effects of the gender pay gap on salary and on employer pension plan earnings across a woman professor's career and retirement, using one Canadian institution as a case study. Taking the gender pay gap reported for that institution by Statistics Canada—approximately $9,000 in 2020—as a difference between starting salaries, we simulated career trajectories for a woman faculty member and a man faculty member just beginning their careers at the institution, and we calculated the cumulative difference using the institution’s salary and pension formulas. In our calculations, we made data-informed assumptions about the expected length of career, age of retirement, and lifespan. We also made a conservative estimate about salary increases: 1% per year, as per Bill 124 in Ontario.

We found that the difference in starting salaries alone, with no difference in time to promotion, led to a gender gap in pay and pension of $454,000 across a career and retirement if both professors were promoted to associate professor, and $468,000 if both professors were promoted to full professor. However, men are more likely to be full professors than women; only three in 10 full professors in Canada are women. With the same difference in starting salary, if the woman was not promoted to full professor but her male colleague was, it led to a gender gap in pay and pension of $660,000 across a career and retirement. Our research shows that only looking at salary leads us to substantially underestimate the long-term effects of pay gaps. In retirement, the gender pension gap translated to a difference in employer pension of $7,000 to $12,250 per year—or $580 to $1,020 per month.

Our calculations are a conservative estimate of the impact of the gender pay gap at Canadian universities. Importantly, unlike many universities, the case study institution does not have performance or merit pay or make market-value adjustments, which eliminates multiple decision points where bias could be introduced.

Our own work focused solely on gender, because race was not a variable provided in the Statistics Canada data that we used. Our values were based on all women professors combined. We know from others' work that the pay gap for racialized women professors in Canada is double that for non-racialized women, so the long-term financial impact of the gender pay and pension gap for racialized women professors will be larger than our calculations for women professors overall.

[Dr. Tracy Smith-Carrier]

Here are our recommendations for your consideration.

First, gender pay equity studies will continue to be needed to rectify ongoing wage disparities. These should look at not only differences in pay, but the longer-term impacts of these differentials, including implications for pensionable incomes, both occupational and policy-related. Examples are CPP or QPP.

Second, more research on ways to remedy systemic biases against equity-denied groups in universities and broadly in society will be valuable in helping to meaningfully close the gap permanently.

Third, as it is being recognized and introduced in pay transparency legislation across Canada—including Bill 13 in B.C.—the promotion of transparency in salary negotiations and pay structures is vital to curb opportunities for bias to creep into salary, performance and promotional decisions.

Fourth, seeking to extend pay and pension equity provisions to equity-denied groups is imperative. This requires greater data collection, research and pay equity studies on the short- and long-term consequences not only of wage and pension differentials, but also of characteristics of the job—examples are unionization or the ability to gain tenure—and the ways in which informal labour, for example parental and caregiving work, yields significant labour disadvantages for some faculty more so than for others.

Fifth, independent research is needed to determine whether institutional pay equity studies and the interventions to address pay equity described therein are in fact remedying pay inequities. We recommend that Statistics Canada publish gender and diversity pay gaps at appropriate aggregate levels and make this information publicly available.

Finally, we recommend that institutions be required to provide gender and diversity pay gap information when applying for federal funding.

In closing, we commend SRSR for supporting Standing Order 108(3)(i), which we think is vital in providing more equitable pay for women faculty and academics from equity-denied groups. Our research shows that looking only at salary leads to a substantial underestimate of the long-term effects of pay gaps. We estimate that the impact of the gender pay and pension gap is $454,000 to $660,000 over the course of an academic career and retirement.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Lloyd Longfield]

Thank you both for your testimony.

Ms. Penner, I'm sorry I missed you at the beginning. You're on a different part of the Zoom screen, so I put the wrong two people together.

Thank you, both, for your testimony.

Now we'll go over to Dina Al-khooly from Visions of Science for five minutes, please.

[Dina Al-khooly, Senior Director, Impact and Learning, Visions of Science]

Thanks so much for having me today.

Hello, everyone. My name is Dina Al-khooly. I’m here representing Visions of Science, where I am the director of impact of learning. I’m providing testimony from the perspective of an organization working with youth from low-income and racialized communities, with a focus on Black youth. We work to encourage our youth's participation and career pursuit in science, technology, engineering and math.

While we have substantial evidence that illustrates and quantifies gender pay inequity, we have little data around other dimensions of marginalization, as the other witnesses have shared. A study by the Canadian Association of University Teachers found that racialized university educators are paid almost 15% less than their white counterparts. Another peer-reviewed study also found that racialized and indigenous professors earn lower wages, even after controlling for such variables as years of service and academic level. The Canadian Journal of Higher Education published a study that examined differences in tenure and promotion among faculty across eight Canadian universities. It found that racialized faculty had 54% lower odds of being tenured and 50% lower odds of being promoted to associate professor than non-racialized faculty.

This also impacts the next generation of scientists coming into the field. One way is through a lack of representation. As faculty are paid inequitably and pushed out in a variety of ways, few remain who can serve as inspiration, belonging and support for future faculty from their communities. Another is access to high pay. Youth from our communities are motivated by earning potential as a means of pulling themselves and their families out of poverty. Inadequate pay is an important deterrent for our youth wanting to pursue a career path.

This is not only a matter of equity. Lived experience is both relevant and critical for expanding our knowledge economy. Studies have shown that under-represented groups produce higher rates of scientific novelty, and yet their novel contributions are taken up by other scholars at lower rates than their peers. Equally impactful contributions of gender and racial minorities are less likely to result in successful scientific careers. Canada ultimately pays for this in more narrow research and underutilized expertise, stifling divergent ways of thinking that are critical for innovation.

These gaps are caused by both education and employment barriers. Education barriers push students, especially Black and indigenous students, out of school at every level and prevent them from having the prerequisites required for university STEM education. Workplace barriers are through both outward and unconscious discrimination, nepotism, workplace culture that alienates marginalized faculty, and structural barriers that punish the essential work of teaching, mentoring, outreach and service that is disproportionately taken on by marginalized faculty.

At the workplace level, there is a lot that universities can do. They can designate faculty positions for those from marginalized communities. They can be intentional about elevating their work and providing opportunities for their promotion and uptake. They can reflect lived experience and responsibilities, such as teaching, outreach, mentoring, and committee and equity work—which ultimately benefits the university as well as the country as a whole—in their pay structure, workload and role expectations. They can increase transparency around compensation, promotion and tenure decisions. They can invest in the professional development of under-represented faculty to diversify their leadership.

We have such limited data that it enables people to continue to deny that these problems exist and keeps the issues under-researched. Universities should be required to publish data about their student body and their faculty by gender, race, indigeneity, disability, sexual orientation and gender identity.

Lastly, we cannot narrow our focus to just the tip of the iceberg. Early and ongoing investment is key. That means investing in education through financial support for both post-secondary and out-of-school-time learning that specifically serves those from marginalized communities. This we have found to be absolutely critical for building their capacity and belonging in STEM outside of the often alienating context of the classroom.

Thanks so much for your time.

[The Chair, Liberal, Lloyd Longfield]

Thank you for your presentation.

We'll start off with Mr. Soroka for six minutes, please.