Thank you very much for this opportunity to speak to you about this. I am not going to focus on the question of skilled trades so much as address the educational trends concerning STEM-area educational programs. I would like to pick this up by noting that despite all of the recommendations that were made by this committee in its 2010 report, which was entitled “Building the Pipeline: Increasing the Participation of Women in Non-Traditional Occupations”, the situation in Canada has actually gotten worse, not better.
I would like to begin by unpacking some of the statistics that were presented to this committee in this particular study in earlier hearings this year. Namely, Statistics Canada presented information that suggested that there has been a great improvement since 1991 in the whole STEM education area. It is true—and I think this committee should be aware of this—that between 1991 and 2005-06 the number of women in various STEM education programs in universities and colleges in Canada did improve. In fact, in some areas, the programs had enrolments of women as high as 44%, which is headed toward equality.
However, as of 2007-08, in every single one of the sub-disciplines that are classified as STEM educational programs, the number of women has not only fallen significantly, but it is lower than it had started out in the early 1990s, so there is a significant reversal that has been taking place over the last 10 years.
The only exception to that is programs in geology, but that is really just because there were a few percentage points above the original 2002 levels that this particular study I am referring to looked at. This is based on data that was assembled by the National Council of Deans of Engineering and Applied Science and the professional association of engineers, Engineers Canada.
In particular, I would draw this committee's attention to the fact that in the most male-predominant sectors of the STEM educational areas—namely electrical, mechanical, software and computer engineering, and mathematics departments—the percentage of women is between 9% and 12%, which is an unbelievably low number of women. This is with the large number pilot projects, and so on, that have been aimed at this particular problem. I would say the time has come to face the fact that the ways in which the government of Canada is tackling this problem are simply not working. In order to assist this committee in looking for perhaps more robust solutions, I would like to draw attention to the fact that Canada's methodology for studying the problem of STEM enrolments in universities and colleges does not stand up when compared with the approaches taken in the United States, or the EU, or other advanced economies.
Specifically, the difference is that Canada has continued to use the methodology of collecting first-person accounts, small sample studies, pilot projects, and community, cooperative, or industry-led projects that are of a very localized level and not particularly embedded in any kind of regulatory framework.
At the same time, the employment equity laws have become almost dysfunctional in terms of correcting gender imbalances as the result of long-standing practices of discrimination, and the federal contractors program, which is meant to ensure that the corporate sector is non-discriminatory even though it's not fully regulated under employment equity laws in all jurisdictions, is nonetheless going to be subject to some sort of regulation. The difference is, I believe, in addition to the non-use of the regulatory tools, which the government has and should be using for the well-being of everybody in Canada, it is not rigorously using scientific methodologies that are easily available to the government of Canada to get a close understanding of what the problems are.
When the U.S. and when the EU went about studying what the problems were in the STEM areas educationally, they assembled independent blue ribbon panels of leading gender, employment, labour, and industry experts to collect as much information as they could, not only with desktop interviews and studies but also with on-the-job scientific studies that calibrated what was going on. They came up with a remarkably similar set of recommendations, none of which have ever been seriously made in the Canadian context.
What have these independent studies shown? They have shown that, consistent with the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women—the UN convention which has produced a significant number of policy requirements that are binding on all governments that signed that convention, including the Canadian government—that it's going to take full stream or full force gender mainstreaming and gender-based analysis on a continuing basis in every aspect of the educational structure in order to correct these kinds of deficiencies. The recommendations are as follows.
First, ensure national sex equality laws and government departments responsible for their application have effective means of monitoring for gender imbalances on a continuing basis in all occupations and particularly in the STEM areas with respect to trades education and employment.
Second, establish a high-level ministry for women's affairs at each level of government including local levels that have independent statutory authority and funding to carry out investigations and address departments in deficiencies that do not meet sex equality standards that guarantee parity or 50-50 representation for women and men in all aspects of Canadian life.
Third, governments need to actively commit to and carry out ongoing gender analysis of all of the programs. For this purpose I would like to remind you that just a few years ago with the Canadian chairs program, 19 multi-million dollar chairs were established in universities to ramp up Canada's performance in innovation and scientific research. Every single one of those appointments was to a male candidate, and part of the reason for that was that the entire short list consisted of nothing but male candidates.
Industry Canada became concerned about this enough to put the program on hold for a short period of time, brought it back, and this time—the second time around—14 appointments were made, and all but one were men.
The continuing inability to even maintain a semblance of gender balance in the chairs program had originally led to a Canadian Human Rights Commission case and a settlement agreement in which there was to be gender equity in all of those chairs from that time on, which was in the early 2000s. This is something that is just simply not being done at all.
Further recommendations that came out of the U.S., EU, and other highly scientific studies included the requirement of funding on a permanent basis and not on a mere project basis; active, independent, and professionally staffed networks for women in science, who are both supported in their own research as scientists and as gender experts in overcoming the gender barriers.... It's a sort of double burden that has to be funded by the government, because women in the STEM educational areas cannot possibly do both jobs at the same time.
The list goes on to require that there be adequate resources for returnees and immigrants who experience tremendous amounts of discrimination, even though a lot of effort goes into recruiting people in the scientific areas to come to Canada. Also, the strong recommendation in both of those studies and others like it is that flexible, affordable child-care programs and meaningful paternity leave are maintained in all aspects of skilled trades and STEM education employment and research areas.
Finally, there is a strong set of findings that a great deal of the responsibility lies on the shoulders of the corporate culture, where—as has already been noted—very few women are even on the boards of directors. The management pipeline for management in the areas that do the most STEM hiring has been shrinking for the last 10 years, and the supply of women moving up into the CEO levels has been shrinking year after year, with no solution in sight.