Status of Women Committee on May 5th, 2015

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

Thank you, Madam Chair.

I want to welcome all our guests here today and say what a great contribution you have all made to our study.

I want to begin first by addressing Doreen Parsons and Anna Marenick from Irving. Being a New Brunswicker, I certainly know and realize the support that Irving gives to all our communities. It's always there for all of us, so I congratulate you on that. As well, I've never been exposed to this kind of support, which you give in another area, and you certainly deserve a lot of congratulations for all you do to encourage girls.

As my colleague mentioned, the funding is very important and very positive because quite often these girls would not go into this without funding from somewhere, so your funding is of great help.

You mentioned the career exploration program, and I think you mentioned there were 20 students in that program already. I'm wondering who is eligible to apply. Do you have an idea of how many women you would have helped in this organization already?

[Doreen Parsons]

Yes, 570 women have participated in our programs since 2005. We do extensive recruitment and outreach in diverse communities throughout the province. We have four sites across the province, one specifically for this Irving Shipbuilding pilot program. We reach out to women who are from diverse communities, who are of diverse ages. We reach out through our own diverse staff. They generally have to have significant interest in exploring trades and technologies. We ask that they have either a grade 12 or a GED and that they have significant interest in these fields. So we have diversity within each of those different sites.

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

Do you have anything else to add?

[Doreen Parsons]

The majority of the women are either unemployed or underemployed, and generally working less than 20 hours a week, if they are employed.

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

Okay. Do you have a long list of people waiting to get into this program?

[Doreen Parsons]

We have a significant number of women who apply during our recruitment process, and again we select 20 for each of our sites. So yes, we have a significant number of women who are interested in participating in Women Unlimited. I would say that much of our recruitment is as a result of our network of women who have already gone through. Some women spoke about role models. The women who went through our program and are now working in industry are perhaps our greatest champions and are the women who really reach out to other women in their communities to participate. There is a ripple effect for sure.

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

Yes. I know you would have many positive results. Is there any one in particular that you'd like to champion?

[Doreen Parsons]

There are so many stories of women who have participated in our program that it's hard to choose just one, but about 60% of the women who have participated in our programs are single mothers, so the impact is significant for them but it's huge for their children as well.

It significantly impacts her children, her family, and her community. Our experience has been that women want to stay in Nova Scotia because their kids are here, their families are here, so it's wonderful if they are able to secure employment in this province because they are likely to stay. It's a great opportunity for employers such as Irving to be part of our partnership.

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

Yes, it provides these parents with good salaries so they can take care of their children. That's another positive note as well.

[Doreen Parsons]

Absolutely. We provide travel fares and transportation supports as part of our program. We try to address all the barriers that impact their success in these programs.

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

That's great. That's nice to hear.

I think Tammy it was you who mentioned a lot of good ideas to initiate women. I wonder if any of them are already in place in your work. One that caught my attention was role models, and we certainly see that is a big idea to help women get into the STEM programs.

Do you want to elaborate on that, please?

[Tammy Evans]

Yes. CAWIC has a mentorship program for women entering the industry. It's not necessarily for young people; it's for anybody in the industry. If you're looking for a role model, we try to match you with a member in or outside our organization. It depends what the need is.

Our studies have shown that mentorship is incredibly important. A senior mentor allows for a broad range of mentoring. It's not necessarily just on that particular issue, but it's a broad range of connections and relationship building, which is invaluable for women in the industry.

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

Yes. It gives the individual a more positive attitude if they have someone to hear their story.

[Tammy Evans]

And it's an ear, a natural ear.

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

Yes. To listen to them.

Marie, you mentioned the study and how important it is. I'm wondering if you have any ideas on how we can encourage girls to spend more time studying, and they too can then qualify for high-paying jobs.

[Prof. Marie Connolly]

It has come up before, and I think providing young girls with the message—

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

At an early age.

[Prof. Marie Connolly]

—that they are worthwhile at an early age, that they have the skills to enter those fields, to choose those fields of study, and then to work in those areas.

There's a lot of research on gender biases, girls can't do math, that kind of stuff, right? There's research showing girls can improve their skills but that knowledge is not acquired, so from early on they tend to think they just can't do it. That is not true, so we have to work hard to change those biases.

[The Chair, NDP, Hélène LeBlanc]

Thank you.

Ms. Duncan, I now give you the floor. You have seven minutes.

[Kirsty Duncan, Liberal, Etobicoke North, ON]

Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you to all of you. You have provided such good information. I have two pages of questions so I'll get to what I can.

Professor Lahey, you have given really good recommendations. Can you provide very specific recommendations regarding national sex equality laws and effective monitoring for gender imbalances in areas such as STEM education and employment? What's your wish list?

[Prof. Kathleen Lahey]

I don't need to have a wish list, because I would prefer to rely on the scientific studies that have produced information on what actually works. What actually works is to make it perfectly clear to universities and colleges that they are there to serve everyone in the country, which includes women and men equally, which means that whatever ameliorative programs are necessary to get women and diverse individuals into the STEM areas of education need to be done, should be done, and have to be done or their funding could very well be on the line.

Governments should not simply feel that they have to hand money out in ways that have not been successful in solving these kinds of problems. It is completely unfair to women in any of the professions and in any of the sort of male-predominant sectors to carry the burden of solving the problems of non-government regulation at the same time that they're meant to achieve the level of qualifications that the men against whom they are competing don't have to carry, in addition to carrying the heavy load of unpaid work obligations that they normally have and that are not going to be compensated for by having temporary child care programs made available while they go to specially funded local programs.

In Ontario, for example, many years ago there was a very aggressive women's apprenticeship program that contained all of the elements that have been described by the Irving Shipbuilding project. It was provided by the Government of Ontario and it was available in all the communities across Ontario. It included access to affordable tools. It included supports for women to be able to overcome all sorts of barriers in their particular apprenticeship programs.

So there are specific things that work. Basically what it means is that the burdens of unpaid work, the burdens of the cost, the burdens of addressing the structural discrimination built into these different areas all have to be shouldered by governments, which uniquely are able to raise revenue and target spending in ways that are really guided by large-scale studies that have proven what works, including taking people to court when they won't comply with the law and using things other than just sort of carrots to induce compliance.

We live in an era in which government seems to believe that it's going to become more effective as a government by letting the market do what it wants, and then acting as if, when the market actually produces something constructive like the Irving Shipbuilding project, there's some sort of a big turnaround on the horizon. It just doesn't work that way and the data makes that perfectly clear.

[Kirsty Duncan, Liberal, Etobicoke North, ON]

Thank you, Professor Lahey.

You talked about Canada's approach to gender and STEM not working. You talked about Europe and the United States. Can you tell us what they're doing specifically and what's working there?

[Prof. Kathleen Lahey]

What's working there is the list that I started down. It contains a total of 15 particular programs, all of which need to be mounted by and monitored by governments. It begins with putting effective non-discrimination laws and programs into place with commissions and compliance bodies that have enough funding to be able to go out in the field and see what is actually happening on the ground by collecting contemporary data, making sure that every possible inequality is being addressed immediately, and having sufficient remedial powers to take steps to correct them. That's the number one, most effective tool that has been shown in a study in the EU involving the 27 core EU countries and the 10 new EU countries. It was carried out by using all of the tools of econometrics and statistical analysis to find out what factors really make a difference.

Then going down the list it's the items that I mentioned in relation to gender mainstreaming and having a fully effective and enforcingly capable Status of Women organization at every level of government to carry out this ongoing kind of invigilation, because these problems are not unique to STEM. As I was going to say at the end of the last question that I was asked, people have held up the example that women lawyers are doing so much better so it must be a unique problem in the STEM area. In fact, that's just simply not the case.

When the Law Society of Upper Canada carried out a comprehensive study a few years ago of how women in law were doing, they found that, number one, the number of women has been falling as the costs of law school tuition have been going up; number two, that full-time women lawyers who have children perform an average of 35 hours of unpaid work each week in caring for children, caring for elders and other members of the family, and caring for their homes. They're the same age, it's the same year of graduation, the same type of work, but male cohorts only performed an average of 13 hours of unpaid work each week.

Canada can pick up a huge burden off the shoulders of women in all sectors, all occupations, by taking the $22 billion that will be spent this year to subsidize women's unpaid work in the home and use just half of that to set up a national child care program that would immediately transform the range of options that are realistically available to women. That has also been demonstrated to be true in this massive EU-EC study that was carried out very recently. The reality is that until all of the caring functions that women, because of their sex, are expected to perform out of the goodness of their hearts or perhaps out of the lack of alternatives, are lifted from them and shared equally by society as a whole—using government as part of the way society expresses its goals and aspirations—this problem cannot be solved.

[The Chair, NDP, Hélène LeBlanc]

Thank you very much.

Mr. Barlow, go ahead for five minutes.

[John Barlow, Conservative, Macleod, AB]

Thank you very much.

Again I want to thank everybody for being here and adjusting your schedules appropriately.

First of all, I wanted to start with Ms. Evans. I only have five minutes. I'm going to try to go as quickly as I can.

You had a great comment and I wanted to just highlight that a little bit. You had mentioned that 65%—or something like that—of women go into post-secondary education or get some kind of university degree. But we still look at college and the polytechnics as an alternative, not a parallel. I think that is a great message that we have to get out. All of us are from that generation, I think, where going to technical school or a polytechnic was where the kids who couldn't handle university went. If they only knew the salaries that come out of those things now.... How do we change that perception? Is there something you are doing to try to change that perception?