Status of Women Committee on April 21st, 2015

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

That sounds really great. I can't wait to see the results. It's great to hear that industry is wanting to be involved.

It would be great if we could promote and enforce pay equity across the board and also maybe encourage women on boards and things like that. Is that also something that you would see as useful?

[Saira Muzaffar]

Yes. The changing the ratio campaign looks at both compensation and representation.

One of our first campaigns for TechGirls Canada was a very simple campaign, which I think anybody on this panel would be able to relate to. I will share my frustration about it after the fact.

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

[Saira Muzaffar]

The campaign is called “Portraits of Strength” and it shares poster images on social media of women in STEM fields: women in leadership positions, women in varied and different positions, and all those things that fit under STEM that we have a hard time defining. I love the fact that we can't define it, because I want it to be big and inclusive.

This campaign generated so much feedback, and this was consistently the feedback: “I wish there had been something like this around when I was making career decisions.” What frustrates me is that I was brought up in a generation where I was told that these problems were already dealt with, that you already had role models and everybody recognizes that what women are capable of and what men are capable of are comparable and there is no difference there.

Now I'm sitting here and fighting the same battles. It's good that the campaign worked, we got feedback from it, and there's momentum in it, but it's also frustrating that this is still the point we're starting from.

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

Yes, you're talking about a lot of systemic social barriers. We've even heard from the ministry of Status of Women that access to child care, for instance, was something that really made a difference. Do you have any other observations regarding systemic barriers or the way that socially we see women in the workforce? Do you have any recommendations around that?

[Saira Muzaffar]

One of the key challenges we're tackling with industry right now is that male counterparts have great difficulty actually articulating what these barriers are, because they've never had to face them. They're not naturally able to draw the connection between harassment, say, or safety at the workplace, and why somebody would actually put up with that because they think their job is on the line. If they don't call for better changes....

Pay equity is also an issue where our male counterparts will often come to this conclusion. Why didn't you just ask for more and why didn't you just negotiate more to begin with? We're dealing with situations where women are walking in with a mindset that has been socialized, that has been shaped by the barriers that they have faced, the mindset that they're not in a position to negotiate better. We're leaving it on women who are already facing these challenges to come out on top without actually changing the systems, the institutions, and the behavioural norms.

Child care is a great example. I'm sure that people on this committee have heard of Facebook and a bunch of other big sites and companies offering to freeze eggs. Have you heard of this story? Okay. They offered this to their top female employees. They would freeze their eggs, because what these sites and companies were finding is what we are finding, which is that up to a certain point women are excelling in career paths. Then after a certain point that clock kicks in, they need to make a decision, and in their minds the choice is still between starting and raising a family or continuing with their career. Facebook does not want to lose these people. It does not want to lose this talent, so they're offering to freeze the eggs. That's one solution.

Another solution is child care—

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

[Saira Muzaffar]

—and you could put money there as well, you know.

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

Okay. Thank you so much.

[The Chair, NDP, Hélène LeBlanc]

I was a little bit confused there, but I think you were talking about the Facebook company.

Indeed? Okay. Because I thought maybe on Facebook....

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

[The Chair, NDP, Hélène LeBlanc]

There are lots of things on Facebook, so I was just a little bit confused. Afterwards I understood what you were talking about.

Thank you very much.

Let's get back to business.

Ms. O'Neill Gordon, you have the floor for seven minutes.

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

Thank you, Madam Chair.

I want to thank all of you for being here with us today.

Your presentation was certainly very interesting. It certainly gave us lots of food for thought. As a former primary teacher, I'm especially happy to hear you say that we are targeting the very young. I'm happy to hear of some of the programs you are looking at. It may just seem very general information, but that's when we can pick up on and find out their interests, and also stimulate them a little bit at that age.

Another important part you mentioned was with the natives. Over my last four years I was teaching at a native school and I enjoyed it very much. I see as well that there are programs specific to first nations. I'm wondering how these programs are designed to engage youth in these communities particularly and if we see much success as a result of that.

[Karen Low]

We started a couple of years ago with Nipissing and North Bay, engaging through the government people there and the mayor, who was very helpful to us in getting into the schools so that we could show them the program and make it available. They immediately saw that they had people who were interested in it and they jumped on board.

[Dorothy Byers]

One of the key things our girls really believe is important—I think this would hold true for all of the teams in FIRST—is to look at marginalized students. There's a group in Bradford, Ontario, and our girls actually went out and mentored a team there so that they had the hands-on role modelling of students who were a little bit older than they were.

There are two pieces to that. First of all, the students who are doing the mentoring have such an incredibly rich and diverse experience, and the students who are being mentored are also the benefactors of the support they're getting from another group of students.

[Karen Low]

We had one student in particular, when I was mentoring the Port Perry team, who was very artistic. He had a lot of Indian designs, and it was just very much from his roots. He was a grade 12 student, almost ready to graduate, and he had no job prospects. Through FIRST Robotics we found that he had such a skill with welding that one of the sponsors, The Metal Man, actually hired him. With his motor skills and such, he is working there to this very day, five years later.

Again, who knew? We didn't even know he had that skill, and he didn't either. It's just amazing sometimes how when someone is put in a particular area, you start to appreciate them for one thing, you start to learn more about them, and you realize just how broad their talents are. We were just very happy, and now, to this very day, we do get money every year from the band there to support FIRST Robotics. It's a win-win.

[Dr. Bonnie Schmidt]

I'll just say that the approach we've learned over the last 18 years is not so much to try to bring indigenous knowledge and put it into our programs; it's to take an approach of working with the community to understand what their local needs are and identify elders who can go with us.

We've just finished a tour across the Arctic Circle. In February and March I sent teams up in minus 65 degree weather. They came back with great stories, in fact from Moberly Lake just last week. We do have advisers at the national level. Most of the national aboriginal agencies do work with us on a panel. We're finding that it's not so much trying to change or torque the programs to make them work; it's to understand that STEM offers a framework of understanding the world around you. It doesn't really matter where you are. You can still understand the frameworks. It's about capturing young people's imagination and building their curiosity

If you go into a community with some of the nuts and bolts of programs that are demonstrated to be of high interest to young people, and you work with them and ask, “How can we together make this work for your community?”, the uptake is phenomenal. In the far north, or in communities where access is a problem, simply getting the kids engaged enough to come to school is half the battle. We're finding that when we have volunteers going into remote communities, even some of the excitement that the teachers are able to build about having somebody come in and show interest in them is all it takes to get participation rates up and absentee rates down. It gives a great building block. We then start to work with the teachers as well and start to see how we can help to frame their practice so that they can continue to maintain the momentum.

But we actively made the decision to not try to infuse indigenous knowledge. It's not our area of expertise.

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

No. I can see that, but I guess once a teacher always a teacher, so I'm happy to hear you give this information. I want to say right now that if you ever get the idea to come to New Brunswick, just contact me. We certainly could use your information and all you have to offer.

[Dr. Bonnie Schmidt]

Thank you.

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

The other note I noticed was the amount. As we know, there are always challenges for girls, and more so, and there are unique challenges for them. What are some of the challenges that we find that are really a struggle for girls or are hitting the girls more than any of the others? You may want to talk about that.

[Karen Low]

I think one is the socio-cultural notion that they don't know they can do it. We want to get them young enough so that no one has told them they can't.

As we've also heard on the panel, too, it's not going to be an interstate, a clean road. There are going to be bumps along the way. That's where we need a network. To me that's one of the greatest things in FIRST. It gives them other people they can talk to for support when they need it. They're always there as a peer, as someone you can bounce ideas off.

Again, I think, it's giving them the confidence. We've even seen some school teams here where they have two teams. They have one for girls and one that's a coed team. The differences on the teams are remarkable, even though they run side by side.

For women, if they don't know they can do it.... A lot of times you can watch the dynamics and see the guy say that he can program. The neatest thing about programming a robot is that they don't know what gender is. A robot runs on the program. If it's a good program, it performs. If it's a poor program, it doesn't. It doesn't care who the programmer is. All of a sudden, then, everybody is sitting back and saying that they didn't think of that.

Again, it levels the playing field in so many ways, and that builds the confidence. Later on, when they're in a situation like that and someone says no to their idea, they're going to say, “Wait a minute, I know there's validity here and I'm going to stand up for it.”

In some ways, it's again that voice at the table that's assured and strong and says, “No, let's look at the data.” Again, that's the core we're building inside those young women.

[The Chair, NDP, Hélène LeBlanc]

Thank you very much.

I now yield the floor to Ms. Duncan, who has seven minutes.

[Kirsty Duncan, Liberal, Etobicoke North, ON]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you to all of you for the work you do. This matters profoundly. I have questions for all of you.

Ms. Schmidt, can you expand on your comment that science and technology are not prioritized across the country?

[Dr. Bonnie Schmidt]

Yes. At this point in time, literacy and numeracy seem to be the common denominator for governments as key priorities. It's understandable and we can talk about that. What we've been trying to do is help policy-makers think about the context for teaching the literacy and numeracy skills.

STEM provides a great context, a contextualization, but the fact of the matter is that when you have to try to bring together, either within a province.... Keep in mind that Canada is the only developed country without a secretary of state for learning, or a junior minister for learning, or a national department for education, so we are battling a jurisdictional issue. On top of having 15 systems of education that are trying to talk to each other, you have, within a province, the problem of trying to align a decentralized approach to education, in which a ministry will have the policies and priorities but then often decentralized decision-making at the school level.

There are very good reasons for it but it also means that you need to have your arrow, so if you are talking about what are key elements—

[Kirsty Duncan, Liberal, Etobicoke North, ON]

What would the recommendation be to the committee? What needs to change?