Status of Women Committee on May 7th, 2012

[The Chair, NDP, Marie-Claude Morin]

Good afternoon to everyone and welcome to the 33th meeting of the Standing Committee on the Status of Women. Today, we will continue our study on improving economic prospects for Canadian girls.

Before we begin, I have to announce that the witness who was supposed to testify at 4:30 unfortunately could not make it. Ms. Jessica Danforth, from the Native Youth Sexual Health Network, will therefore not be with us today. So the committee will end its meeting earlier, that is, at 4:30. In fact, Ms. Danforth is at the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. We will try to invite her again at a future meeting.

For the first part of our meeting, we have, via video conference, from Halifax in Nova Scotia, Ms. Tricia Robertson from Techsploration, and Ms. Margaret-Ann Armour, the President of the Board for the Canadian Centre for Women in Science, Engineering, Trades and Technology.

Ms. Ashton, you wanted to speak?

[Niki Ashton, NDP, Churchill, MB]

Can we invite Ms. Danforth at an upcoming meeting on the same subject we are studying now?

[The Chair, NDP, Marie-Claude Morin]

Yes, we will try to invite her next week, if she is available. There should not be a problem.

[Niki Ashton, NDP, Churchill, MB]

If she cannot come to the meeting where we will be discussing this issue, could she send her observations to the committee, and explain to us why she was not able to appear today?

[The Chair, NDP, Marie-Claude Morin]

If Ms. Danforth cannot be available for this study, we will ask her to send us her observations anyway. I presume that committee members agree with Ms. Ashton's suggestion.

I believe that is the case, so we will now move on to the testimony from our guests, beginning with Ms. Robertson. You have 10 minutes to make your presentation, and then we will move on to Ms. Armour, who will also have 10 minutes. Then, we will go to questions by committee members.

Ms. Robertson, you may begin. You have 10 minutes.

[Tricia Robertson, Executive Director, Techsploration]

Hello. Can you hear me?

[The Chair, NDP, Marie-Claude Morin]

Yes.

[Tricia Robertson]

My name is Tricia Robertson. I'm executive director of the Techsploration program and I have been since its inception in 1998. I have been researching policies, procedures, and collective agreements, and have developed programs related to women in science, trades, and technology since the late 1980s.

I'm going to tell you about the Techsploration program. I think it's a good way to lead into the types of recommendations you're looking for. Techsploration was built from an idea. It began 14 years ago, because we believed if you wanted—

[The Chair, NDP, Marie-Claude Morin]

Ms. Robertson, I have to interrupt you. The interpreter is indicating that the volume is very low and that it is very difficult to hear you. Can you please speak into the mike?

It's your mike, probably.

[Tricia Robertson]

Someone's looking at it as we speak.

[The Chair, NDP, Marie-Claude Morin]

You may continue, Ms. Robertson. We will see whether the interpreter can hear you.

[Tricia Robertson]

Techsploration was built from an idea. It began 14 years ago, because we believed if you wanted to make a change in the number of women in science, trades, and technology, you had to reach the young women. As a result, Techsploration provides young women from diverse backgrounds in grades nine through twelve with opportunities to learn about careers in these fields. It also helps them to understand the significance of high school math and science to their future careers, and it helps them create awareness about the critical role of work in their lives.

Techsploration gives young women the opportunity to enhance their public speaking, presentation, and report-writing skills. They also learn about communication, leadership, and teamwork—all skills that employers want. It helps “techsplorers” to increase their levels of self-confidence, self-esteem, and cultural awareness, but more importantly, Techsploration provides information. Information is empowering and absolutely changes lives.

The success of Techsploration is the result of the collaboration and commitment—

[The Chair, NDP, Marie-Claude Morin]

Ms. Robertson, I have to interrupt you a second time. I apologize. The interpreter is indicating that you're speaking much too fast. Can you please slow down a little?

Thank you.

[Tricia Robertson]

Okay. I'm a self-taught person who does speak very quickly.

Techsploration gives young women the opportunity to enhance their public speaking, presentation, and report-writing skills. They also learn about communication, leadership, and teamwork—all skills that employers want. Techsplorers increase their levels of self-confidence, self-esteem, and cultural awareness, but most importantly, Techsploration provides information.

Information is empowering and it absolutely changes lives. The success of Techsploration is a result of the collaboration and commitment of teachers, parents, elders, role models, governments, industry, unions, and professional associations, all working together to develop ongoing community partnerships.

Techsploration is a not-for-profit organization. It is governed by a volunteer board of directors and eight committees. It began in 1998 as a pilot project. Now, this year, we have over 40 schools in the program, 350 role models—teachers and volunteers—who participate each year, along with 3,000 students. This year, more than 50 program events were held around the province. It begins with the annual launch and briefing session for teachers. It's a kick-off for another year. It's an opportunity to brief our teachers.

It is followed by the workplace tour, or “Techsploration goes to work”, where each school team, which is comprised of six grade nine girls, meets their assigned role model at a workplace to learn about her career and her workplace environment. At their workplace tour, they might go up in helicopters, spend a day on a tugboat tour, go to a laboratory, learn how to weld, or go on a forensic dig.

Once they have completed their workplace tour, the next part of the program is “Techsploration goes to school”. During this time, the Techsploration team share their research and workplace experience with students at their school. Everyone benefits. This includes not only the young women, but the young men, teachers, and guidance counsellors. They all have the opportunity to learn about careers as they meet role models in a round-robin event.

The round-robin workshop is a key feature at all of our events. Each role model sets up a station with props. Small groups of students rotate from station to station as they meet the role models, participate in hands-on activities, and have the opportunity to ask questions.

The final part of the program is a large conference. We have three of them. This is the opportunity for girls on the school teams to hear what the other teams have learned about. They also participate in a round-robin workshop where they meet the role models from each assigned team.

Finally, we have an alumni event. It is held each November for the girls in grades 10, 11, and 12. This is one opportunity for these young women to participate in a huge round-robin and meet many more role models. For example, last year we had 28 role model stations.

That's a snapshot of our events.

We also have a resource tool that we developed called “women in action web videos”. It's a resource tool. It's featured on our website at Techsploration.ca. Essentially, it's a snapshot of a role model's life and her career in two minutes. We currently have 30 online. We will have 60.

We have another special project. It's our new website and portal. It was three years in the making. We just unveiled it in December. As a result, Techsploration now has the ability to reach more young women. We also have sections of our website dedicated to each of our stakeholder groups, including alumni, teachers, role models, sponsors, and volunteers at our board and committees.

The next phase is yet to come. This is Techsploration in the future. It is our long-term strategic goal. It means instead of reaching more than 3,000 students, by developing online workshops, we'll have the opportunity to reach thousands more who are unable to participate at the 50 events. It also means that there will be a way to keep in touch with the young women of Techsploration after they graduate from grade 12. It will help us to measure the impact of our interventions. It means we will be able to develop new tools that will assist the young women and enable them to make more informed careers decisions.

We have three partners in the Techsploration program, including the community college, WITT Nova Scotia, or Women in Trades and Technology, and the apprenticeship training division of the Nova Scotia Department of Labour and Advanced Education.

Techsploration exists because of our 38 sponsors. They represent an incredible example of collaboration and commitment. The chief thing is that they provide not only financial resources but role models and volunteers for our boards and committees and events. They also provide in-kind support.

Our sponsors recognize that their commitment to Techsploration is also a commitment to families, to our communities, and to the next generation entering the workforce.

To wrap up, we will be celebrating our 15-year anniversary this fall. We're looking for ways to incorporate the first International Day of the Girl Child as well as the theme for International Women's Day, which is “Connecting girls, inspiring futures”.

I would like to wrap up with a quote from one of our Techsploration alumni. She said:

The most important thing I learned from Techsploration is that no matter who I am, a girl, boy, black or white, I can be anything I want to be. I learned something from every role model, which I will take with me through life.

We have four recommendations. One is to promote role modelling through a government-led campaign to promote awareness and counteract the negative impacts sometimes experienced by women from supervisors and peers.

We'd like to engage young women in taking a lead role in this study. For example, what works for them? What doesn't work for them? We'd like to provide an opportunity so that they continue to talk about the stories after they've been on a workplace tour.

We would like to do more role modelling on the website. We want to develop video conferenced workshops between role models and schools to promote science, trades, and technology careers. The workshops would continue to highlight the importance of math and science, the significance of work, and the way to make choices.

Finally, somewhere along the line we talked a lot about balancing work and family, but it seems to have fallen off the radar. For young women, this is very important when they're studying or when they're working. We need the government to focus on a campaign to help them balance work and family issues.

Thank you.

[The Chair, NDP, Marie-Claude Morin]

Thank you very much, Ms. Robertson.

We will now move on to Ms. Armour.

[Margaret-Ann Armour, President of the Board, Canadian Centre for Women in Science, Engineering, Trades and Technology]

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, NDP, Marie-Claude Morin]

You have 10 minutes.

[Margaret-Ann Armour]

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.

[The Chair, NDP, Marie-Claude Morin]

Ms. Armour, you have one minute to conclude.

[Margaret-Ann Armour]

I'm sorry, what did you say?

[The Chair, NDP, Marie-Claude Morin]

You have one minute to conclude your presentation.

[Margaret-Ann Armour]

Thank you.

Those workshops help to make the workplace respectful and inclusive.

To sum up, the factors we are working on through WISEST and the WinSETT Centre are to provide hands-on experience to girls in areas in engineering, science, and the trades that they might not choose; to allow them to meet women practitioners as role models and mentors; to bring more mothers into those areas so they can influence their daughters; and to have welcoming workplaces.

We really believe this will enable girls to make career choices that will greatly improve their economic prospects.

Thank you.

[The Chair, NDP, Marie-Claude Morin]

Thank you very much.

We will now move on to questions.

We will begin with Ms. O'Neill Gordon. You have seven minutes.

[Tilly O'Neill-Gordon, Conservative, Miramichi, NB]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

I want to extend my sincere thanks to our witnesses. You certainly have given us lots of food for thought with the experiences you have shared with us this afternoon.

What you told us indicates the different careers and opportunities you are making these girls aware of. No doubt these opportunities will be profitable to these young women in making career decisions. I applaud both of you for the work you are doing and the initiatives you are all taking to make this happen for the betterment of young girls.

Our committee is also working towards what's best for Canadian girls and women—economic prosperity, participation, and leadership. We're looking for changes we can make. This is what we are trying to focus on for the betterment of young girls.

Can you tell us what our committee should focus on to improve the economic participation, prosperity, and leadership of aboriginal girls in Canada?

[Margaret-Ann Armour]

The young girls should have the opportunity to meet with aboriginal women who are already in the professions and the trades. We had a group of young aboriginal girls we were talking with about being in the trades, and we brought in a woman who was aboriginal and who was a carpenter. She talked with the girls and it made a huge difference to them. Here was someone they could identify with who had already shown that this was possible and even profitable. I think meeting aboriginal women who have been able to make a career in areas that many of the girls have not thought of is very important.