Thank you very much.
On behalf of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, or SSHRC, thank you for inviting me to appear before the committee today.
SSHRC is Canada’s federal agency to promote and support post-secondary research and research training in the humanities and social sciences, research that builds knowledge about people in the past and present with a view toward creating a better future.
SSHRC-funded research supports deep inquiry into the human condition in all its complexity and diversity, contributing to breakthrough insights into persistent social, cultural, technological, environmental and economic challenges. By investing in scholarships, fellowships and research training, SSHRC helps develop Canada’s best and brightest scholars and researchers into future leaders. It enables the highest levels of research excellence, and facilitates knowledge-sharing and collaboration across research disciplines, post-secondary institutions and all sectors of society.
With regard to the committee's study on economic leadership and prosperity of Canadian women, I would like to highlight our recent efforts in the context of two programs that SSHRC administers on behalf of the three granting agencies. Those two programs are the Canada research chairs and the Canada excellence research chairs programs, where we face issues similar to the lower proportion of women entrepreneurs on the research side.
Since its inception in 2000, the Canada research chairs program, CRC, has enabled universities to attract and retain top scientists and scholars from Canada and abroad, to conduct cutting-edge research, and to train and mentor the next generation of highly skilled Canadians. The Canada research chairs program has ongoing expenditures of about $265 million a year to establish 2,000 professorships across Canada.
The Canada Excellence Research Chairs Program awards universities up to $10 million over seven years to support ambitious research programs at Canadian universities.
There have been concerns in both chairs programs regarding the number of female researchers nominated by institutions. In the early days of the first program, the CRC program, the proportion of female nominees was lower than their respective proportion among Canadian university faculties. In the case of the more recent Canada excellence research chairs, CERC, program, all the nominees put forward for the 19 inaugural positions were male. So a number of initiatives were subsequently implemented to ensure more representative nomination processes.
For the Canada research chairs, I'm just going to mention a couple of examples. We collect and monitor voluntary self-identification of designated equity group status for nominees and chair recipients. We maintain direct outreach and education with post-secondary institutions to establish equity targets. We have launched an annual process in which one university is publicly recognized each year for exemplary equity practices in recruiting, nominating, and appointing Canada research chairs.
For its part, the Canada Excellence Research Chairs Program is proactively promoting exemplary equity practices. In its second competition, the CERC program has taken several steps towards this end. We require universities to report on their recruitment processes and outreach efforts. We have added the quality of the recruitment process used by the institution to recruit their nominees as one of the selection criteria. We ensure that expert opinion on equity is gathered during the review and selection process. We also provide recruitment best practices to universities.
The results of all these actions indicate the situation is improving. The percentage of Canada research chairs awarded to women has almost doubled, from 14% in 2000 to 26% in 2014, and in the latest announcement just four weeks ago, 29% of all chair holders were women.
Now I'd like to introduce two SSHRC-funded scholars whose research and expertise provide important insight on this issue. I offer SSHRC's assistance in finding additional experts if you need them.
First is Dr. Alison M. Konrad, chair in women in management at Western University's Ivey School of Business. Dr. Konrad's research interests centre on gender diversity in organizations. She has produced award-winning papers on gender effects on earnings, affirmative action programs, and gender differences in job attribute preferences.
Next is Dr. Catherine Elliott, assistant professor at the University of Ottawa Telfer School of Management. Together with colleague Joanne Leck, Dr. Elliott studies the challenges faced by women, visible minorities, immigrants, disabled persons, and aboriginal people in advancing to senior positions in the workplace.
Over to them.