Thank you, Madam, for the opportunity to address you and members of the committee.
I'm going to take a short period of time and then have my colleague Terry Weymouth conclude with some specific examples around skilled trades.
Unifor is an organization representing 305,000 employees and workers across the country in very diverse occupations, from members who make cars right up to pilots. About one-third of our membership is female, so just around 87,000 members. Of our membership, we represent over 40,000 skilled trades.
For our skilled trades numbers, we track about the same as the numbers you've been hearing here, which is around 4% female membership in the trades. In the STEM occupations it's a little bit more difficult to get the numbers on those because as you heard from one of your presenters in an earlier session, there isn't complete agreement on what makes up STEM occupations. But I can tell you that we represent significant numbers of members in aerospace, telecommunications, health care, and the education sector, and I'll give you some examples from those areas.
Across the board we hear from our female members that they have issues with accessible, affordable child care. That is a fundamental issue that affects many of our members no matter which of the areas they're going into. Where we have members who work in shift work or in intensive work scheduling, there is also a difficulty in balancing the roles that women play in taking care of their family members—their children, their parents—and fulfilling other roles, and balancing that with work as well.
We've identified some of the same issues you're hearing from others, the streaming and the lack of role models. You'll hear from Ms. Weymouth about how you need to see it to be it, and you'll hear about some of the role modelling that we've been trying to be party to. There is attitudinal barriers not only within young women in what's open to them but there still remain attitudinal barriers of employers in giving opportunities. Again, I won't go through all of our brief but you'll see some more examples in there.
We have looked at the women in our STEM occupations and found that they still cluster in the lower wage and lower security occupations. The example I've given is that we represent a university that does a lot of health care research, and the principal investigators who have more secure jobs tend to be male, and the women tend to be the research assistants working on one-year and 18-month contracts. Eventually we hear from our members that they need to leave that precarity in order to seek out something more secure that might take them out of a STEM occupation and certainly take them out of the trajectory they might have otherwise been in. So movement within the careers is identified there.
Harassment is still an issue where an employer is not giving a clear signal that women are welcome and that women are there because of their ability. We do find there is resistance to women being in workplaces where they are the overwhelming minority.
I'm going to throw it over to skilled trades specifically and to some promising examples. But before I do, again on a broad basis, in our trade union education we try to make sure people are exposed to diverse members delivering that education from different occupations.
I'm happy that we're going just after the Irving Shipbuilding example and that it's not just white women. It's also women of colour, it's also women with disabilities, and it's also racialized men. We try to bring in our anti-harassment, respectful workplace education. We also have a program of joint investigation where there are allegations of harassment or of a lack of a respectful workplace.
We have a scholarship offered to women going into a male-dominated field. That was put in place by one of our predecessors, the CEP, following the Montreal massacre, and tries to encourage women and give them the support they need in order to take steps that at the time when that scholarship was put in place were usual for women.
I'll throw it over to Terry.