Thank you, Madam Chair, for the opportunity to participate in the development of this committee's important study. My focus today will be on providing concrete examples of the efforts being made by Natural Resources Canada, or NRCAN, industry, and other partners to understand and overcome the barriers to gender equity in the natural resources context.
Canada's natural resource industries are important economic players. In 2015, they accounted for nearly one-fifth of GDP and 1.8 million direct and indirect jobs.
Conventional natural resource industries, in Canada and around the world, are at a crossroads. Our transition to a lower-carbon future will require maximizing our potential, including women, men, youth, immigrants, Indigenous peoples and all demographic groups.
The government-wide implementation of gender-based analysis has prompted us at NRCan to examine the natural resource landscape through a demographic lens and to consider the disproportionate impacts of resource development on certain groups.
More specifically, GBA+ at NRCan has enabled increasingly comprehensive gender- and diversity-based assessments of policy proposals; a greater awareness within the department of gender disparities in the natural resource and STEM workforces, as well as ranges of incomes for those women who work in the industries, and the number of women in leadership positions; and a growing understanding of the barriers to women’s equitable participation in S and T occupational groups at NRCan and more broadly in the natural resource industries.
With this greater understanding of the demographics and statistics, NRCan’s focus in the coming years will be on putting in place initiatives that actually bend the curve, whether it be in the lab, the shop floor, the boardroom, or our own department. The gender disparities in the natural resource sectors are evident within each of the primary industries—energy, forestry, and mining—and across key employment areas, including natural and applied sciences, engineering, trades, heavy equipment operators, and management. For at least the past five years, the ratio of male to female workers in the resource sector has been 80-20. I think I distributed a placemat that shows some of the facts and figures related to these numbers.
We feel there are three general areas where NRCan is taking steps to reduce the barriers to greater gender diversity. First, we're delivering programs that seek to improve the participation of women and other under-represented groups in the natural resource industries. For example, Career Alliance 360 is an NRCan program designed to enhance representation of women and indigenous peoples in key STEM fields, with a particular emphasis on northern Canada. Our Geological Survey of Canada has the Alice Wilson Fellowship, given to two outstanding women scientists pursuing post-doctoral research in the field of earth sciences.
Our forest service has the aboriginal forestry initiative that supports efforts that increase the participation of diverse groups of indigenous women and men in the sustainable transformation of Canada’s forest sector. This program seeks to mainstream gender-based considerations in project development and capture diversity and gender-related data.
In 2013 an analysis of gender representation in the mining sector was introduced as a key indicator of social performance in the “Mining Sector Performance Report”, which we publish every three years. As with other indicators, the section on gender diversity offers an overview of data trends over the past decade, as well as examples of best practices.
NRCan is also involved in international activities with the goal of enhancing participation. The International Model Forest Network is led by NRCan and includes 30 countries that are working in partnership with industry and civil society to develop a common vision for the sustainable development of forest landscapes and ecosystems, recognizing that globally women are often the keepers of culture and traditional knowledge.
NRCan is also involved with the clean energy education and empowerment initiative, or C3E, through the Clean Energy Ministerial, an international network to advance women’s leadership in the global clean energy sector. The efforts of industry, academia, and other partners to close the gender gap in the natural resource industries can be instructive and complementary to NRCan’s efforts.
As part of NRCan’s gender-based analysis plus work plan for 2017, we’re looking to engage with industry sector councils, associations, and other organizations to learn from their experiences. The Mining Industry Human Resources Council, for example, continues to actively support greater gender and demographic diversity in industry by conducting surveys and research, sometimes in partnership with allies, like Women in Mining Canada.
Our intent in consulting with industry, academia, and other potential partners is to identify collective priority areas of improvement, enabling us to focus our work on complementary actions to improve the representation of women in Canada’s resource sectors.
Internally at NRCan, the majority of the department’s labour force is in science and technology, but women remain significantly under-represented in some key S and T groups, including scientific researchers. This is a third area where we can do more. NRCan has been making gains in addressing this imbalance. For example, in 2012, our Canadian forest service introduced the women in research initiative, a pilot project to enable women in various S and T groups to move into the scientific research job classification. Given the high success of the pilot, the initiative has been extended to reach more high performing women in S and T across our organization.
The National Energy Board, for example, is also taking steps to enable women’s corporate leadership. Their Women’s Leadership Community of Practice aims to increase awareness of gender-based challenges facing women in the workplace and helps participants develop their own personal method and style of leadership. Recently under the leadership of NRCan’s deputy chief scientist, we aim to inform future iterations of our employment equity action plan. NRCan completed a suite of initiatives, including analysis of two years of demographic data, gender-based demographic analysis of the career progression of NRCan’s research scientists, and a study of women in science and technology in the department.
The early recommendations arising from this work include strengthening our internal processes to address unconscious bias and remove barriers to career progression, as well as to actively promote leadership opportunities.
Thank you for the opportunity to speak with the committee
I would welcome your questions.
Thank you.