Thank you, Madam Chair.
Thank you to our guests for coming in today and for providing such wonderful insight into this subject for our study.
I'd like to begin with a quick story, if you'll allow me, just to tell you what I do. I'm sure most of us members of Parliament at one time or another speak to classes, particularly in Ontario, in grade five and grade ten, because part of the students' curriculum is civics. So I often find myself speaking to grade five and grade ten students.
A few months ago I visited a grade five all-girls class, and I began the way I usually do, by asking how many of them planned to grow up to be politicians. I don't think I've ever had anyone actually raise a hand and say yes, because they don't think of themselves as future politicians when they're ten years old.
So in this grade five class of girls.... I guess my point is I think in some ways the trades and engineering and sciences are kind of the same. There aren't enough young girls who see themselves 20 years into the future as politicians or engineers or scientists, whereas even as young as grade five many of them can think of themselves as teachers, for example. That's one I can think of off the top of my head that is for whatever reason more encouraged in young girls.
That turns in my mind into a question of age and how important it is to “get them young”, shall we say. So high school is a great place to start. Do you find that by grade nine there's already that stigma or unwillingness to look at a career in engineering or science? Or do you find that this is early enough, that grade nine is young enough to get started?
Ms. Robertson?