It's starting to change but it's changing very slowly.
There are some very significant role models out there today. Women role models in senior positions are important, not just to women, but are actually more important to men. Men need to see women in positions of power in order to get comfortable with that. That's starting to happen.
If you look at my written submission, you'll see that I talk about the notion that the first thing you have to do is to fix what we call the “plumbing”. There are barriers to entry for women. There are are all sorts of policies, procedures, and processes within corporations, within universities, and within government that basically deter women from applying. They make it harder for women to apply.
A good example is a recruiting night where the only recruitment people there are men, and they're perhaps playing a video of a hockey game as their entertainment. Maybe they have a male hockey star there. They're not doing anything deliberately exclusionary, but we've seen that this can create an environment in which women don't even bother to apply. So, first of all, you have to fix the plumbing.
I would go back to the other speaker's comment that the federal government has a lot of resources through which it could make a change to the situation at no cost, namely making sure that the crown corporation boards and government agencies are all gender diverse. I would set a target for that. I would commit to their all being gender diverse by a certain time. First, that would cause people to comply with that—and there's no reason they can't. Second, it would start to change the organization from within.