Thank you.
I appreciate this opportunity to make a submission to the Standing Committee on the Status of Women.
I'm representing the Canadian Centre for Women in Science, Engineering Trades and Technology, and also WISEST, at the University of Alberta.
For 30 years now, since WISEST began, we've been asking the basic question: why are so many girls not choosing careers in the trades, engineering, the sciences and technology, which would give them so much more security and better economic prospects than many of the service jobs they're in?
We know, as Tricia has told us, that many of the girls don't know about the possibilities that are open to them and they also see very few women role models in the areas they might be interested in. So they exclude these areas as possible areas of work they can do, not even recognizing that there's no reason they shouldn't do them.
We've realized that within schools there's not a lot of opportunity to learn about trades and even to learn about engineering. When we ask young women here why they chose engineering as a career we very often get the answer that their mother or their father or an uncle or a close family member was an engineer, so they understood what engineering was about. Or perhaps they've been in one of the programs that WISEST runs and have learned about engineering. So our question was, what can we do to change this?
There were several answers, one of them being that hands-on experiences, the kinds of things Techsploration does, real experiences in trades and professions and in engineering, and imitating role models and mentors makes a tremendous difference.
The example of the program that WISEST has run is we invite grade eleven girls to come and spend six weeks working in a research group at the University of Alberta during the summer, and we pay them for this work. They have the opportunity of joining a group and discovering one of the areas in which engineers of all disciplines can work. We find that this intrigues them, because now they begin to understand how the work that engineers do relates to their own life. They meet women engineers and scientists, and often at the end of the six weeks they come and say “This is science, this is engineering. I can do it.” So they discover it's something they want to do and something that's relevant to them.
This program has about 60 students who come each summer, and it has a parallel program at Memorial University in Newfoundland. It's one that can probably provide a very appropriate template for other colleges and universities to have students. We feel it's a very good program because it uses resources that are already present: faculty members, staff members who are doing research, who can have young women come and join them, and they can be the role models for them.
The WinSETT Centre is also involved in programs working to give girls an experience of science, engineering, and the trades. We've had young aboriginal girls come to a science laboratory and make nylon. They are usually wearing nylon, or their shoes or backpacks are made of nylon, so they're doing something that means a lot to them, because they realize this is something that's relevant to them.
I was very delighted when two young women who were here a year ago asked to come back and brought a whole group of their schoolmates with them from two reserve schools about two hours west of Edmonton, and then took great pride in showing the rest of their friends how to do the experiment in the lab. They had bought into it. They had become excited by science.
The WinSETT Centre has now also developed a prototype of a five-day trades and technology camp for aboriginal girls. This has already been tried in a high school in Saskatchewan with great success, and we're hoping to run this again in other high schools, in as many as we can, for the aboriginal girls in grades 10, 11, and 12. It will provide what we believe is tremendously important, real hands-on experience, so that these girls can understand “This is something I can participate in; this is something I can do.“
I should say that when we had the aboriginal girls in the chemistry lab, once they became comfortable in the lab we saw they have wonderful hands. Because they're so used to baking bannock, doing things with their hands, when they came to make nylon they probably did the best job I've ever seen of any schoolchildren. It shows that giving them experience with tools so they can understand what the trades are like, they will feel this is something they can do.
There are so many aspects in which we can make a difference in the number of girls choosing these professions and trades. I mentioned that when we asked our young women why they have chosen engineering, they often say it's a family member. I can't help thinking that if we can attract women into the trades who are mothers—and I know there are groups across Canada working to do this with women who are living at a very low income level being encouraged to take training to be in the trades—then we have a mother who is a tradesperson. Her daughters are then much more likely to consider going into trades because they have that role model and a very close family member involved in it.
Finally, if we are encouraging these girls to go into areas we've been talking about—the trades, the sciences, engineering, technology—we have to try to make sure that the workplaces they're entering will welcome them. One of the areas the Canadian Centre for Women in Science, Engineering Trades and Technology has been working in is to try to ensure that workplaces are both inclusive and respectful, so that when the girls move into the workplace they don't feel this is not a place they want to stay in.
We've developed workshops for current employers using a tool called a checklist of strategies. It looks at the kinds of things that might make their workplace less than inclusive and then we work with the employers to remove whatever problems they might be having with respect in the workplace.