Absolutely we've been looking at that. In fact, on our website we've created a business case to show the economic benefit of having women in some of these non-traditional jobs in the skilled trades and how companies and employers can remove or address the barriers when they're hiring women.
Basically, even recruitment strategies that they have for women can change, in terms of what attracts women. Instead of having an interview at 3:30 in the afternoon, when women have to go to pick up their children, for example, the time of the interview could be changed. Small things can go a huge way in recruiting more women to these jobs.
Workplace culture is another aspect. Many women who go into these various non-traditional fields find that they're the one of whatever—the first helicopter technician, or engineer, or whatever—and the workplace culture is just not conducive to their staying in those jobs. Even though they trained for them and made it into that workplace, they're leaving, for whatever reason. Perhaps it's because the workplace isn't conducive to child care or elder care, or perhaps it's because of workplace habits, in terms of the teams and the kind of language that's used out there.
One thing we've tried to do is create a business case so that there can be consensus around the country whereby people can say, yes, this is why we need more women on boards. A few years ago Status of Women worked with the Conference Board of Canada, and we came up with a business case—and now it's out there—that people are talking about. Now it's becoming much more common to talk about the business case for women on boards, about why more is better and is profitable and all that.
Concerning women in skilled trades, we still have a way to go, because, as I said, 95% of the people in skilled trades are still men. What can we do? We also did a business case on women in skilled trades, which employers can use, to provide some strategies they can employ to attract more women into these fields. That's on our website, and we have the provincial and territorial governments working with us, so they're promoting it to all the employers out there.
We're finding out from some folks that women in some of these cases are actually better for the bottom line because, for example, they take better care of the big trucks they're driving because they actually read the manual. This is what the Canadian Truckers Association, for example, told us.
Another example is the mill workers in the forestry and the paper products industry. They're saying that they're much more organized, they clean up after themselves, they delegate well, they're better team players.
That's not to say that women are better than men. It's not going down that road. It's just basically saying not to discount women because they have child care responsibilities or because they can't come to the interview or because they have to do things a little differently in the workplace. We're trying to promote that, absolutely.
The business case is on our website, but if you'd like, we can send it to you as well.