Status of Women Committee on April 21st, 2015

[Dr. Bonnie Schmidt]

There must be a database of female scientists who are here.... People such as Elizabeth Cannon get named to things numerous times. The president of the U of A, Indira Samarasekera, is on quite a number of things. I think it's about getting access to the names. I've been really impressed with the Status of Women priority on women on boards, the initiative that was tabled earlier this year, which has definitely applied trying to find the recommendations.

In all honesty, I think that it's sometimes not a desired goal to not choose women, but just a lack of awareness of who might be available and interested and of the networking. As you start to have opportunities to integrate, to promote, and to showcase the campaigns for where the talented women are, you can see that there are a heck of a lot of them—look around the room—getting their names out there, and it's helping to prepare them for some of the leadership roles.

[Laurin Liu, NDP, Rivière-des-Mille-Îles, QC]

The federal government also has a system they use called “gender-based analysis plus”, which looks at gender-based analyses of legislation. The “plus” takes other factors into account, such as age, education, language, geography, etc., so this deals with other issues and includes gender. Do you think this has been used effectively by the federal government to date?

[Dr. Bonnie Schmidt]

It is beyond me to comment. I don't know.

[Saira Muzaffar]

I actually don't know anything about that, so that's probably an indication of how effective it's been so far.

[The Chair, NDP, Hélène LeBlanc]

Thank you.

Thank you very much, Ms. Liu.

I now give the floor to Ms. Truppe for seven minutes.

[Susan Truppe, Conservative, London North Centre, ON]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Now I'll ask my questions for Dorothy and Karen, which I didn't get to ask last time.

You mentioned—I don't know if it was in the 1980s—that there were 26 teams and two were girls' teams. Is that right?

[Dorothy Byers]

That was in 2002.

[Susan Truppe, Conservative, London North Centre, ON]

It was 2002. I couldn't hear that first part. Then I think you said that there are 4,300 direct participants now. Is that right? It was something like that. I was wondering if you knew how many of those participants were girls. Or do you even have that?

[Dorothy Byers]

I don't have that specifically, but if you look at the 10 teams in Canada and the probably 30 girls on each one, you can get a bit of a ballpark on that. I can tell you that of the 23 all-girls teams in the world, 10 of them are in Canada.

[Susan Truppe, Conservative, London North Centre, ON]

That's wonderful. That's really good.

[Dorothy Byers]

Yes, it's pretty awesome, actually.

[Susan Truppe, Conservative, London North Centre, ON]

More people should know about that.

You also mentioned $150,000 in university scholarships. Of those scholarships, what are they for? Are they split evenly between the girls and the boys or are they for them to develop themselves more in STEM courses? What are they for?

[Dorothy Byers]

The university scholarships are awarded the same as any scholarship would be awarded. Some of them are phenomenal, with x number of dollars over four years. It would be the universities that are not using any kind of determination as to whether it's a boy or a girl receiving a scholarship.

[Susan Truppe, Conservative, London North Centre, ON]

Right, so it's not whether it's a boy or a girl and not necessarily taking STEM courses per se?

[Dorothy Byers]

No, those are—

[Dr. Bonnie Schmidt]

That's required.

[Susan Truppe, Conservative, London North Centre, ON]

Oh, they are. That was the other half of my question.

[Dorothy Byers]

Also, it's their experience in FIRST as well.

[Susan Truppe, Conservative, London North Centre, ON]

That's really good.

The other thing you mentioned was the federal support of $1.5 million over three years. You got provincial support as well. What do you use that for? Where does the money go to, not to the penny but just roughly?

[Karen Low]

We're a very lean organization. Some of it does go to administration. About 35% goes to direct support of teams and another 35% goes to the support of the FRC, the regional events, because we have costs for that.

Ideally, we would love to entertain perhaps $8 million over four years on a go-forward basis, because one of the things we've realized in talking to more underserved areas is that not every community has a resource like a large business there to pull mentors from and stuff. We're finding that we're doing more and more on computer outreach and community-based groups, in addition to the schools. We also find that for the folks in Quebec now, a lot of the schools there are doing a lot of work in translating everything into French and are also working with teams overseas.

[Susan Truppe, Conservative, London North Centre, ON]

That's good.

[Karen Low]

It's just an amazing international network. Again, the funding is key.

[Susan Truppe, Conservative, London North Centre, ON]

Absolutely it's key, and we're always very happy to support it.

Bonnie, in your recommendations you talked about endorsing the funding and supporting that. Can you elaborate on that? What was that for?

[Dr. Bonnie Schmidt]

The science, technology, and innovation strategy that was released in December had a new piece in there that was putting $10.9 million per year into NSERC's PromoScience fund. That has been a core funder of many of the outreach organizations across the country. I hope it will be deployed strategically. It about quadruples the amount of money. I think it's a very good step in the right direction.

[Susan Truppe, Conservative, London North Centre, ON]

Great. Thank you very much.

I'll split the rest of my time with my colleague, Ms. O'Neill Gordon.