Thank you, Madam Chair.
I thank the committee for inviting TechGirls Canada to present and to participate in this important study along with the other panel members here. In my statement, I will focus on six key reasons why our efforts to date are failing to achieve equitable change and equal compensation for women in STEM, and how we need to approach solutions going forward.
TGC focuses on building community and driving change by spearheading and amplifying support for women's leadership in STEM fields. Our platform provides national leadership to over 300 organizations working to encourage more women and girls to consider career options in tech fields.
Through numerous documented studies, we know that women's access to roles in leadership positions and their financial compensation in these positions do not competitively or equitably compare to the access and compensation available to men who have similar experience, expertise, and qualifications. This is true for most industry sectors, not just STEM fields, meaning that with all things being equal between two job candidates, one man and one woman, even in the average best-case scenario the woman will make 20% less money than the man and will face more barriers when applying for senior leadership positions than he will.
We in both the private sector and the public sector question why this is still the case at a time when we have the largest number of educated women and women in the workforce than we have ever had historically. This can be understood if we always remember the following.
One, simple access to education is not a good enough solution to attracting and retaining women in STEM fields. The education itself needs to be considered.
Two, there is no equality without equitability. When industry, institutions, education, and culture, both social and corporate, are designed to benefit the status quo and the privileged group, we cannot achieve equality between men and women without changing how we educate our youth, how we support professional development, how we structure and exercise hiring practices, and how we foster and promote leadership and excellence.
Three, individual merit does not trump and cannot balance the influence of institutional and behavioural barriers. Leaving the onus on the individual to represent themselves and transcend both institutional and social barriers is not a good enough solution and speaks to neither equality nor equitability. We have seen time and again how women in general are chastised for not negotiating better and for not being more assertive. These claims do nothing to address the systemic institutional barriers that keep women in the workforce from building STEM careers whilst being fairly compensated.
In order to address equitable change in STEM fields and others, we in the private sector and the public sector need to understand the language, the cues, and the baggage of being a woman in the workforce. A majority of our decision-makers are men in positions of authority who have blindly enjoyed their privilege without ever having to understand what micro-aggressions are, why safety and harassment at work go hand in hand with job security, and why having a family and more responsibilities can be perceived to mean one is less serious and less capable of taking on a prominent role in a company, instead of the opposite.
Real solutions lie in helping us become better at identifying and mitigating our learned and subjective biases, individually and organizationally. We need to think about merit at the same time that we think about privilege. We need to think about professional development at the same time that we think about meaningful access and support. We need to think about education and behavioural change for everyone, not just women. We need to deal with the issues at all stages simultaneously, from elementary school, to internships, to continued development and advancement appointments, because tackling only the pipeline portion of this problem does not provide any solutions to the women who are already in the workforce.
Real solutions lie in challenging the notion of fostering, hiring, and promoting only those who look like us. Most hiring policies in the private and public sector favour candidates who are a good cultural fit, a fit decided and informed by the existing privileged class. Lip service to race, gender, and social class understandably does not go far enough in helping decision-makers take into account how social barriers can shape a candidate's experiences and our perception of them.
I would like to close by helping you focus on a statistic that has terrified us at TechGirls into taking action, and I will caveat this by saying that the stat comes from U.S. Labor. A white woman makes on average 77 cents to every dollar her male colleagues earn. When we look at women of colour, that average drops to 55 cents. This is the state of things before we even look at the barriers of social class, access to education, support in professional development, and institutional barriers to health care, the judicial system, and a host of other relevant factors.
The situation is dire but not impossible to resolve. The solutions, however, need to be encompassing and, more importantly, they need to be tried, tested, measured, and improved, as all the panel members have spoken to.
We greatly look forward to the committee's study and recommendations and would like to support you in this in whatever way we can. The top three things we would like to communicate to the committee in regard to what we can do for women in the workforce right now are these: create legitimate transparency in hiring, compensation, and performance reviews; create and support awareness of learned and unconscious biases around race and gender; and invest in and incentivize flexible work infrastructure for both men and women.
Thank you.