Thanks very much. I'm pleased to be here.
I will try not to repeat what has been said by the other panellists, although I very much endorse some of their key points.
I'm going to provide a high-level presentation drawing on a number of studies that Ryerson's Diversity Institute in Management and Technology has conducted in recent years. Unfortunately, most of them are only available in English, but if people want to follow up with me, I would be happy to provide more detail.
These studies include one for the Information and Communications Technology Council, looking at diversity, competitive advantage, with a focus on the ICT sector, and a study with Catalyst, which surveyed 17,000 middle managers across Canada, 7,000 of whom worked in technology sectors and 3,000 of whom were women. A recent study on unemployment in Peel showed a huge disconnect between the needs of employers and the available labour market. It was not a skills shortage, it was a skills mismatch. The jobs were there, the people were there, they weren't getting connected. I think that needs to be addressed. I guess the most recent project is one with the Canadian Advanced Technology Alliance, which looks specifically at best practices for attracting and retaining women in Canada's technology sector.
So I'm going to try to draw from those studies at a high level. But the Diversity Institute is focused primarily on fact-based strategies to promote inclusion. We are in a business school, and for that reason we very much endorse the notion that inclusion is not just—although it clearly is—a matter of equity and human rights. Inclusion is also a matter of national competitiveness and innovation. We would like to see a better linkage between many of the social and developmental policies and the economic and innovation policies because they are so clearly linked.
Because I'm used to talking in three-hour blocks and I have 10 minutes, maybe only seven now, I'll start with my conclusions. The paper is high level because I wanted to stick to the 10 pages, but there are a few key points that I want to ensure I communicate.
The first thing is that I've entitled my paper "More than Just Numbers, Revisited" because I've been working on this issue for 20 years. Many of you will recall after the Montreal massacre that there was a huge focus on women in technology professions. The Canadian Council for Professional Engineers produced the “More than Just Numbers” report in 1992, which recommended an integrated strategy to promote women in engineering in particular, but it has implications for women in other non-traditional occupations.
I regret to say that many of the recommendations in that report almost 20 years ago are just as valid today as they were then. We made some progress, but in the last decade there has been considerable backsliding, and in fact you'll see from the data that today in Canada there is a lower percentage of women in computer science than there was 20 years ago. The participation of women in engineering increased over the 1990s, peaking in 2001, and since then it has declined, not quite back to the same level. In contrast we've seen tremendous growth of women in biotech and life sciences. We've seen tremendous growth of women in business and management programs, and the participation of women in mathematics programs at universities is well over 40% today. So the notion that women are excluded from technology professions because they don't do math is simply fallacious.
The CATA WIT study--Canadian Advanced Technology Alliance Women in Technology--which is hundreds of pages long, focused on best practices in employment. We did a lot of work with companies like IBM and Hewlett Packard and so on to look at best practices for attracting, retaining, and advancing women. However, working on this for the last 20 years, I'm absolutely convinced that those measures are important. Things we do at universities are also important. But many of the critical decisions that set young womens' lives in motion are a result of influences that affect them as early as grade three.
We need an integrated strategy. We need a strategy that focuses on upstream issues. We need a strategy that looks at the broad environment.
The other thing I have to say is that over the last 20 years--and we did a study where we evaluated 75 different programs--there has been a huge amount of energy and attention focused on this issue, lots of resources invested, very little longitudinal evaluation done to identify initiatives that work, as opposed to initiatives that are well intentioned. So obviously one of my themes, coming from a university, is the need to really emphasize the real evaluations--not the one-page evaluations that many organizations submit at the end of their funding--that look not just at satisfaction and participation levels, but also look at impact, at longitudinal effects over time.
The other thing that I want to underscore, which the other speakers have done, is the intersections between race and ethnicity and immigrant status, disability, sexual orientation, and so on. Our research showed very clearly that in large high-tech companies like Hewlett Packard and IBM, there is a slight gap between men and women in perceptions of fairness. Women feel excluded from informal networks. They don't feel they have the same opportunities. But the gap between white Caucasians and visible minorities is far greater than the gap between men and women, so the intersection between those issues is critical. Similarly, whether we're talking about engineers, lawyers, politicians, the intersections between gender and socio-economic conditions and class are huge.
I was the daughter of a single secretary who was widowed at the age of 33. I found out what an engineer was when I was 22 years old, surrounded by them working in a government office. I thought engineers were the guys at the back of the train in the caboose. There is a huge class and socio-economic dimension to young people's choices that often gets obscured, and we have to make sure that all residents of Canada have equal opportunities.
The notion of the links between social and economic policy is absolutely fundamental. Affordable, accessible day care is an issue that was raised across the country in all of our discussions--both the survey of over 3,000 women and also the consultation. It's a huge issue. It has a huge impact on women's ability to stay in the workforce.
The paper that is in front of me....
Dr. Fry, how many minutes do I have left?