Thank you, everyone. Thank you for the invitation to appear today.
I will give my presentation in English.
This is an important question, obviously. The Centre for Women in Politics and Public Leadership at Carleton promotes women's roles in public leadership by providing leading edge research and training. We work with a wide range of partners to integrate, strengthen, and advance existing work in critical thinking that enhances women's influence and leadership in public life.
We know that women continue to face many challenges in advancing to leadership positions, and I believe that if women are not in positions where decisions are being made, it is significantly linked with their prosperity and economic well-being. There's a correlation, a link, between them.
The centre did a study, which we have brought for the committee, called Progress in Inches, Miles to go. It looks at a benchmark study of women's leadership in Canada. When I was a deputy at Status of Women, we heard so often that women have attained equality. We did the benchmark study to have the evidence base that says, on many fronts—this looks at the leadership front—it's very clear that Canadian women have not attained full equality.
When we look at industries, women are significantly, and continue to be significantly, under-represented in senior leadership positions. In our 2012 benchmark study, we showed that women make up 29% of leadership positions. It's 26% when you remove public administration, which includes the public service of Canada. In some sectors, such as energy and mining and the technical centre, it's approximately 10%, or even below.
On the FP500 boards, it's 15.6%, as our last Canadian Board Diversity Council study showed, with only 9% in mining and oil and gas. Women are significantly under-represented in the higher-paid industries, such as resources, technology, engineering, and they're disproportionately concentrated in industries such as public administration, elementary education, nursing, and service industries. All of this has economic ramifications for the economic prosperity for women.
In our benchmark study, we did a deeper dive into the public service of Canada and the mining sector. That was a juxtaposition of a sector that's done quite well, when you look at the public service of Canada and the strides it has made in advancing women into leadership—it's not 100% yet, but it's come a long way—and the mining sector, which is at the bottom end.
In the Canadian Board Diversity Council annual report last year, when the sector board members were asked if there was a need for change or whether they should keep the status quo in terms of women and diversity on boards, much of the mining sector said they didn't see any need to change.
Of course, all of this starts with the education system and with how guidance counsellors influence young girls and boys. Women in the past, although they do well in science and math, have not been encouraged to go into professions such as technology and engineering. Those sectors themselves have not encouraged women, by the very way that their culture works. They have made it less than friendly for women.
We know—and I'm speaking to the converted—that women are graduating from universities in higher numbers and are well represented in the professional schools. We know that the challenge is not a supply challenge. When we look at law and we look at M.B.A.s, there have been a significant number of women graduating from law schools—in law firms, in government, and in the judiciary. We still only have approximately 30% of the partners in law firms being women, and approximately 30% of the judiciary are women. At the academic level—it's a little better in the law schools—they're still significantly under-represented.
There have been several studies, one of them by the University of Chicago, which looked at their M.B.A. graduates. In fact, the women M.B.A. graduates normally started with a lower salary than their male colleagues and ended up earning less as they proceeded, despite having the same level of education. This again leads to disparities and differences in the economic well-being of women.
What are the challenges that we face? One that we looked at in our study was societal expectations and workplace culture.
There are still gender notions of leaders, which tend to be focused more around the male model. Despite all of the studies that exist on the leadership capability and qualities that women bring to the table, the way that promotional boards often look at it is through the lens of the existing male models. I still hear that women who are assertive are seen as aggressive and are viewed negatively. I've heard reports of promotional boards that will say a man is a go-getter just because he is aggressive, but a woman is really aggressive. We also know that women are promoted on what they've already done and men are promoted on potential. So that results in disparity.
We all know that women often do not negotiate their salaries because they don't want to be seen as self-promoting, which is again another cultural norm that holds women back. Sometimes it's to their disadvantage to negotiate, but many times it's to their disadvantage not to negotiate, because the difference in wage and income earning in part relates to where you start and how well you negotiate that first level of salary.
We still have cultural norms that reinforce women as the primary caregivers for children and parents and so-called workplace family-friendly policies reinforce this because they don't actively support men who seek to be equal caregivers. Just as an example, when we were doing the mining study I spoke to a senior mining executive who told how much he supported women with their family responsibilities. I asked him what he did for the men. He asked me why I had asked and told me that they didn't do anything. I asked him why they didn't do anything. If you do not do it for the men then you harm the women because you continue to reinforce the same cultural norms. It was not by any conscious decision on his part, but simply an unconscious lack of awareness of what the implications were.
So if we need to change the cultures, family friendly policies need to be truly family friendly. I think the federal government with its top-up policies and other policies has done better on average than the private sector in encouraging that.
I don't want to take too long, but want to just highlight a couple of others. There are many other things that we can talk about, but I'll leave those to your questions. One of the areas that I know is of interest here is that women entrepreneurs are viewed as risk-averse and cannot access funding as readily as male entrepreneurs. So if you step out of the industry and the employee stream and you look at women entrepreneurs, they're not doing as well. That has a huge cost to society, something in the range of $2 billion.
I was part of the Canadian task force for women's business growth. If you are interested in that report it's on the Telfer School of Management's site. In it there was a statement that if women-owned enterprises were growing at the same rate as male-owned enterprises, there would be another $2 billion in the Canadian economy annually. That's significant because there still are a number of barriers and challenges facing women entrepreneurs.
Finally, some of the other things that block women from advancement are the verbal and physical violence directed against them. In particular, I would focus not only on the violence against women in society as a whole but that's also directed at women who seek leadership and power. We've seen a lot of these kinds of comments in the media when women speak up, and the misogyny and the terrible comments that are directed at them.
I think of the recent University of Ottawa situation involving the young woman who was on the student council and some of the comments that were made by men about here. These things do harm to women's aspirations for leadership. Our economy needs women in leadership positions.
So that's how I'll end. I'll leave it open for all of you to raise questions. In our work at the centre we are looking to do this kind of background research, looking at some of these broader areas and segmenting some of them. For example, we're going to be looking at some of the areas that are coming up, too.