Status of Women Committee on April 21st, 2015

[Karen Low]

Correct.

[Pat Perkins, Conservative, Whitby—Oshawa, ON]

Think back to when you were in elementary school. I'm not sure, but I'm going to suppose that you had a choice of taking home economics.

[Karen Low]

Like many students today, there are a lot of girls who would love to take shop class, but again when you start looking at timetabling there are really some hard interfaces and you can't do both. This is also because we don't have a grade 13.

Having three kids go through the system, the public system, trying to just get all of the electives and everything else for science, you don't have a lot of time to take those extra ones. To me it's the co-curricular, the extracurricular activities, whether it's working in a basement, at FIRST Robotics, TechGirls Canada, wherever these kids are getting the hands-on.

I had the fortunate chance.... I was going to be going to go to a big name university, but my dad had a medical problem and we had no funding. However, that was.... I was like the lucky squirrel that found a nut. I was able to go to a co-op school, which was phenomenal because I could work, I could go to school, and it gave me a chance to try out positions I didn't know whether I wanted or not. In six weeks you can go anywhere and decide whether you like it or not. But it was that hands-on that grew my experience over five years to get a degree and get a master's.

To me whether you get that in a school setting or co-curricular, it's just phenomenal. I wish everyone had that choice.

[Pat Perkins, Conservative, Whitby—Oshawa, ON]

You went into the automotive industry as an engineer.

[Karen Low]

I did. That's correct.

[Pat Perkins, Conservative, Whitby—Oshawa, ON]

We're blessed to have you as a mentor for people. I'd like to point out that back in the day, before most of you were born—

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

[Pat Perkins, Conservative, Whitby—Oshawa, ON]

—you had home ec or shop classes. That was it, and it was only home ec for girls and only shop for guys. So we have come a long way from the day of that mindset. I am delighted to see more women mentoring women and I think that the more we can do that.... Would you agree that women mentors are really the resource that we should be trying to mine?

[Dorothy Byers]

I would certainly support that.

In preparing the brief I did quite a bit of research, which I really thoroughly enjoyed—and I mean that sincerely. There's a wonderful magazine that was published by the American Association of University Women that focuses on STEM. It has two huge articles in it that talk about the role and impact of mentors on girls and how critical it is for them to see women in positions to which they might aspire, or maybe not. As Karen says, it gives them an opportunity to ask the questions, to work cheek by cheek, and to really understand what they're building and the challenges they face, and then, when they're done, to be able to continue with those mentorships when they're in university. Harvard has an amazing program as well, and so does Columbia University, for girls working with women who are slightly older than them and then continuing that relationship in their professions. So they're really gaining strength through that key recommendation.

[Pat Perkins, Conservative, Whitby—Oshawa, ON]

Bonnie, I know you want to weigh in on that, but I have one other question that I need you to answer as well. That is regarding the STEM acronym, which you're saying is just not resonating with people. At some point before you all leave today, I would like you to think about that and tell us what you think we should be doing about it. Should we be advertising it out there so people understand it? Should we be making some changes? I'm not sure what the answer is, but it's obviously something that you could speak to at some point.

But, Bonnie, you wanted to weigh in.

[Dr. Bonnie Schmidt]

Sure, just quickly on mentoring, while I absolutely agree that it's critical to get more women in mentoring roles, I would not like to do it at the exclusion of engendering men in helping with this. I have a Ph.D. in physiology and some of the best mentors I've ever had in my entire career have been men. So it really is getting under that cultural piece of doing that.

On STEM, I've been scratching my head about it for 20 years and I'm actually at the point of nearly giving up and just adopting the global acronym and trying to get it out there as something. The U.S. has adopted it. The last 10 years they've been using it. It's a globally used acronym that Canada is really just picking up. It's very difficult, and in my favourite world it would just be a case of saying that we are living, we are alive, and this is an integrated approach to what we need to do for the 21st and 22nd centuries. However, you can only hit your head against the wall for so long and say, okay if people understand STEM to be this, then let's make sure they understand that. If you can come up with an answer, I will adopt it and spread it out there, because we're struggling.

[The Chair, NDP, Hélène LeBlanc]

Thank you.

[Dr. Bonnie Schmidt]

Now the nearest one is “STEAM”, because we need to include the arts. But this is where I think the labels break down, so recommend or come up with a word that we can all use and get behind.

[The Chair, NDP, Hélène LeBlanc]

Thank you very much.

If you have any ideas or flashes of genius similar to those in the presentations, please convey them to us.

Ms. Duncan, you have the floor. You have five minutes.

[Kirsty Duncan, Liberal, Etobicoke North, ON]

Thank you.

To FIRST Robotics, you mentioned that you engage students in under-resourced areas. How do you do it? Do we have any metrics? In how many schools do you do that, with how many students, and how many teams?

[Dorothy Byers]

I don't have all the metrics for it, but what I would like to say is that in being able to work in areas that are under-resourced, it's about the opportunity that FIRST has to be able to meet the needs of the teachers in the schools or the board when they put their hand up and say, this is something that we would really like to have for our students. Just the growth that we've been able to see through the funding of the government has really helped us achieve that goal.

[Kirsty Duncan, Liberal, Etobicoke North, ON]

Can I ask you to table with the committee the stats that you do have for under-resourced areas?

Would it help to have funding for those specific areas?

[Karen Low]

Absolutely. We have a couple of slides that I don't think were translated, so I can't show them to you. But if you do have your hard copy, you might just want to take a quick look at them. You'll see the three-year federal funding that we have—and, Bonnie, you spoke to this as well—and that we were able to grow our programs at a rate of about 30% a year. Again right across the board, whether it's junior FLL, FLL, or FRC, we knew there was a sunset but were sitting there saying that we have about a year, that we can run our programs for about a year and after that—

[Kirsty Duncan, Liberal, Etobicoke North, ON]

So the recommendation would be very specific.

[Karen Low]

Very specific, yes, absolutely. The only thing holding us back from serving more of those underserved areas is funding.

[Kirsty Duncan, Liberal, Etobicoke North, ON]

Thank you, Karen.

Ms. Muzaffar, you raised a really good point on micro-aggression. As you say, women are still chastised. The reason women aren't making the same amount of money is because we don't negotiate.

Can you comment on what your very specific recommendations would be here?

[Saira Muzaffar]

My very specific recommendation would be that, as a government, you could gain a lot for us by incentivizing industry to change behaviours within workplaces. As a government, you cannot sit in boardrooms, cannot sit in on performance reviews, cannot sit in on all these other touch-points where micro-aggressions make a play, where women feel unsafe or feel what is now known as imposter syndrome. The specific recommendation would be to let TechGirls Canada, or organizations like TechGirls Canada, run beta tests on how things can change within workplaces; incentivize or make it easier for industry; and celebrate the fact that industry is getting behind changing the ratio, addressing intersectional issues.

[Kirsty Duncan, Liberal, Etobicoke North, ON]

Can you give us examples of micro-aggression?

[Saira Muzaffar]

A micro-aggression would be if you sit down for a performance review and somebody tells you that when you're sitting with clients you should smile a lot more. That's a micro-aggression because that comment would not apply to a male counterpart. “Smile more”, “be polite”, “be nicer”, those are micro-aggressions. They are subtle social cues. Usually, but not always, these cues are socialized through men and women to the women in the workforce to make them fit a certain part. They're not saying anything that's illegal; it's not overt harassment. I am not the best person to give you more examples right now.

[Kirsty Duncan, Liberal, Etobicoke North, ON]

Perhaps you could think about it and table with the committee other examples of micro-aggression, as someone who was in an environment where you were asked when you planned to get pregnant and to take leave, or finding out that your pay was in the bottom 10th percentile of your workplace and being told that it's because you're a women. I'd be grateful if you could table some of these examples with the committee.