Status of Women Committee on March 26th, 2015

[Alison Hale]

For this presentation, the national household survey data is an excellent source of information for national level data to look at information by occupation, gender, and field of study, which is why we were able to do that comparison of 2011 data to 1991 data. It's still a very rich source of data. It's very good quality, and it's excellent for this type of presentation.

[Mylène Freeman, NDP, Argenteuil—Papineau—Mirabel, QC]

One thing I know we have sort of stopped tracking is the share of unpaid work. The Status of Women representative who was here yesterday, Linda Savoie, mentioned that there are reasons, such as juggling child care and things like that, which do make it more difficult for women to enter into these fields of employment.

Do we have any data around that?

[Alison Hale]

Yes, unpaid work was originally put on to the census of population in the early seventies, because that was actually the only vehicle available. Since then the generalized social survey has a module on time use, which is a much more appropriate way of looking at unpaid work and general time use.

There is data that came out in 2011 and there's another cycle coming out in 2016.

That's a more appropriate way of collecting that information, so that's available.

[Mylène Freeman, NDP, Argenteuil—Papineau—Mirabel, QC]

Are you able to draw statistical links between spending time taking care of children, spending time doing household work, spending time taking care of other family members, and ability to move up in STEM fields? Is there enough to look at there?

[Alison Hale]

That's a survey I'm not at all familiar with, so....

[Mylène Freeman, NDP, Argenteuil—Papineau—Mirabel, QC]

Is that not being examined at all?

[Alison Hale]

It's not my area of expertise at all.

[Mylène Freeman, NDP, Argenteuil—Papineau—Mirabel, QC]

Okay.

I do want to ask you specifically about your presentation.

On slide 3, we're looking at 1991 to 2011. I want to ask you specifically, are you able to say what may be contributing factors to the increase in participation or holding STEM jobs by women between those years?

[Alison Hale]

As I mentioned, there are definitely more women participating in post-secondary education. Looking at data from the labour force survey, women are participating more and more in post-secondary education, so there's a natural movement in that.

[Mylène Freeman, NDP, Argenteuil—Papineau—Mirabel, QC]

Is the proportion with which women have increased in studying STEM fields equivalent to the proportion in which they've been employed? Can we make that comparison?

[Alison Hale]

It's not something we've looked at as part of this presentation.

[Mylène Freeman, NDP, Argenteuil—Papineau—Mirabel, QC]

Okay. So we don't know whether there's a direct effect between increased education and increased employment.

[Alison Hale]

No, we can't....

[Mylène Freeman, NDP, Argenteuil—Papineau—Mirabel, QC]

Okay.

Slide 7 indicates that partly due to their choice of field of study, young women with STEM diplomas or degrees have higher unemployment rates than other women. Do we know why that is? Do we have any kind of data around what the reasons are for higher unemployment rates of women who choose to go into these fields?

[Alison Hale]

Basically, right now it's an observation. There are different unemployment rates. One thing to note is that these unemployment rates are generally relatively low in and of themselves. At this point it's an observation. We'd have to do more studies to disentangle as to why.

[Mylène Freeman, NDP, Argenteuil—Papineau—Mirabel, QC]

That would be interesting. Could you suggest some kind of indicators that could be looked at to assess what might be causing that sort of disjunction?

[Alison Hale]

It wouldn't be appropriate just to speculate.

[Mylène Freeman, NDP, Argenteuil—Papineau—Mirabel, QC]

It's not your job.

[Alison Hale]

Don't ask statisticians to speculate without data.

[Mylène Freeman, NDP, Argenteuil—Papineau—Mirabel, QC]

Okay, so you can't talk about different indicators or something like that.

[Alison Hale]

It wouldn't be appropriate.

[Mylène Freeman, NDP, Argenteuil—Papineau—Mirabel, QC]

In 1993 Canada did a violence against women national survey that had a lot of data about how women experience violence. We haven't done that survey since 1993. We did it once. It's an international standard and it's amazing work that StatsCan was able to do. It's too bad that we don't have any more recent data, but do we have anything in there that may relate to how violence at home, domestic violence, and violence that women are living is affecting their ability to perform in their jobs?

[Alison Hale]

That's an area I'm not familiar with, but we could get you a quick update on the status of that.

[The Chair, NDP, Hélène LeBlanc]

Thank you very much.

Thank you very much.

Ms. O'Neill Gordon, you have seven minutes.

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

Welcome. We're very happy to have you. We thank you for your time that you're giving to us because this study is very important to us, and we certainly like meeting with different witnesses to get their ideas and to learn what they have been doing.

Throughout our study and through our meetings with different witnesses, we always talk about different ways and new initiatives to encourage women. Can you tell us what initiatives you see that are now in place that weren't in place during those years of our survey? What initiatives are in place to engage women to pursue skilled trades and STEM studies, and are there others that you'd like to see put in place as well?