Thanks very much. It's a pleasure to be here today.
I'm a professor of entrepreneurship and strategy. I'm a former vice-president of research and innovation. I've served on a number of selection committees at various levels, and I have 30 years of experience as a researcher, peer reviewer and chair of many committees.
I really have three points today.
The first is that Canada is changing, and any research on the Canadian population has to reflect these changes. It's also worth noting that we recently did a survey with Environics of 5,000 Canadians across the country. Fifty-six per cent believe that the current focus on equity, diversity, inclusion and accessibility is a good thing. Twenty-seven per cent were neutral, and only 16% thought it was a bad thing. I think we need to make sure that we're not swayed by a lot of the anti-EDI discourse that flows over the border.
My second point is that—and this really confirms what Dr. Sukhai said—excellence in research requires an equity, diversity and inclusion lens in the design and implementation of research projects or else we put Canadians' prosperity, lives and well-being at risk.
Finally, great minds don't think alike, and homogeneity often leads to groupthink. There are many ways of knowing, and different research traditions, approaches and methods are needed to produce high-quality research. We also need disciplinary and demographic diversity.
I just have a few points to elaborate on that, and I will submit a written brief after.
When I talk about shifts in the Canadian population, I mean that one-third of the workforce is now racialized and that 27% identify as having a disability. Women are now the majority of university graduates. They own 20% of businesses, are joint owners in 17% more, and their 20% of businesses contribute $90 billion to the Canadian economy and account for about a million jobs. So, if you ignore gender in economic development strategies, in entrepreneurship and in innovation, you're losing out. We also know that, obviously, indigenous people have constitutional rights, and indigenous youth are the fastest-growing segment of the population. So, Canada is changing.
From our perspective—and I'm in a business school—we focus on how equity, diversity and inclusion supports business goals and objectives. Many of you know polling, for example. If survey research is not disaggregated by gender, by region, by age and so on, it doesn't tell us what's really going on. We know with health research that not disaggregating data and bringing in a gender and diversity lens results in, for example, COVID vaccination strategies that result in very high infection rates for certain segments of the population. Some of you may be familiar with Kwame McKenzie's research that showed that, in Toronto, the Black community had nine times the infection rate of the white community. It was when they brought an equity, diversity and inclusion lens to the public health strategies that they were able to reduce that to comparable levels. That is a perfect example of where bringing an equity, diversity and inclusion lens to research resulted in saving lives.
There are a lot more examples, whether we look at genomics research or whether we look at car safety systems. For example, it became clear that women were more likely to be injured and killed because car safety research used male crash test dummies.
Fundamentally, the kinds of things that the CIHR is building into research design requirements are critical, in my view, to excellence. My Ph.D. is in information systems. When we look at artificial intelligence, we see that if you don't bring a gender and diversity lens, you embed bias and do more harm than good. There are a lot of examples that I will bring to that when I'm answering questions.
As a result, we know that diverse perspectives are critically important to research. When you are trying to engage with diverse populations, having teams that are also diverse strengthens not only the innovation and multiple perspectives but also the ability to engage with certain segments of the population.
We also know that disciplinary diversity is really important.
One of the big failures in Canada is the gap between our research excellence and our innovation. I would argue that this comes from an overemphasis on science, technology, engineering and math, and a lack of emphasis—