Thanks very much, and thanks for the opportunity to speak with the committee today on its important work.
My appearance here today is serendipitous. I was scheduled to meet yesterday with Elizabeth May, Marilyn Gladu, and Sheila Malcolmson about their work on the all-party women's caucus in connection with some work I'm doing with Universities Canada, and Marilyn said, “Oh, are you free tomorrow morning?” I was, so I am here, and delighted to be here.
I have been engaged with Universities Canada, where I'm a board member, on work to promote women's leadership at Canadian universities over the past almost two years. We recognize that, as in many other sectors, women's leadership in Canadian universities has been stuck for almost two decades. About 20% of our 97 Canadian university presidents are women now, and that has been the case for about the last two decades. We wonder why. We are very concerned that there are patterns here and that there are forces happening that we should examine, analyze, and try to change. We are seeking advice and support from other advocacy groups for women's leadership as well, and hoping that in the work we do we can start to see some significant progress.
You would think that in higher education, where, as we know, over half of the undergraduates now are women and in many fields women's participation is growing rapidly, we would have that senior leadership, but that is not the case.
My university, Mount Saint Vincent University, since its beginning in the mid-19th century, has had a core focus on women in leadership. We were founded by the Sisters of Charity of Halifax and, in fact, became the first degree-granting college for women in the British Commonwealth, so we have a very strong mandate to advance women's opportunities in leadership.
We host the Atlantic women in science and engineering chair. There was discussion earlier this morning about the need to advance women in science and engineering and the work that's being done, and that chair...both research and camps for girls, getting them at grade 7 or grade 8 and talking to them about persisting in math and engineering. Those things are, we think, going to make a difference in the long term.
We are also the home of the Centre for Women in Business, the only university-based centre for women in business in the country. They've been doing interesting work for many years now in areas such as supplier diversity, which looks at requiring companies that get federal contracts to show diversity in the suppliers they're engaging.
There are many things at work in the issues we still face with regard to women's economic participation in our country's well-being and women's opportunities for leadership. We've certainly made progress over the last 150 years, but we've hit a plateau in many cases, and progress now seems slower than it was in earlier periods.
Many of us are working, as your committee is—for which we can be very grateful—to root out the causes and, more importantly, to look at forging some solutions. Some of the causes are structural, and we have quite a lot of research to show that. Professor Nesbitt referred to the “plumbing”. Another metaphor that a colleague of mine used, which I like very much, is “The boys built the playground”: the equipment, the slides, the swings, it's all made to fit the traditional patterns of male participation in the workforce. I think it's important—and Professor Nesbitt mentioned this as well—that there is no pernicious plot to keep women out on the part of the boys who built that playground. It has just been naturalized. It feels right that things are organized in that way.
We have to start picking that apart and finding out what's in fact not natural but constructed, and what can be changed. For example, because of the way things are structured, and partly because of home and family responsibilities, which still rest predominantly with women, women won't have necessarily the opportunity to network after hours, to hang out and make those business contacts and have the opportunity to connect with mentors and sponsors. One field where my university does offer a degree is in hospitality and tourism, and in that field you progress by being moved to different markets in progressively more senior positions. Again, there's a pattern in our playground where the men will move with families, but women have traditionally been much less mobile, much less prepared to move their family with them for their work. This is true not only in the hospitality industry, but it's also true in banking. It's true in many sectors.
Am I out of time?