Evidence of meeting #43 for Status of Women in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was men.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Prof. Richard Nesbitt
So, please don't put that imposition on new women coming on the board, when you also should be putting it on the men who are sitting on the board.
Conservative
Rachael Thomas Conservative Lethbridge, AB
I agree. That's why I'm privileged to be a member of the Conservative caucus, where all men and women are equally skilled.
My next question for you, Mr. Nesbitt, is with regard to what women need in order to succeed at those positions that are high up.
This same question will be going to you, as well, Ms. Griffin Cohen.
One of the things I've heard from many of the women entrepreneurs to whom I've talked, or individuals who are seeking high-up positions within businesses or boards, is that they desire mentorship. That's one of the things I hear over and over again. I would love to hear your reflections on what you're seeing as the greatest need that women are communicating.
Prof. Richard Nesbitt
There's nothing wrong with mentorship, but mentorship creates no risk for the person mentoring. The better term nowadays is “sponsorship”. Sponsorship means that the person recommending the woman—the young woman, perhaps—is actually taking a risk. In my work in industry, I was able to promote women into positions of power and take a risk, because maybe they're going to succeed, maybe they're going to fail. It's the same thing with men: maybe they're going to succeed, maybe they're going to fail. But you have to take the risk. That's what's called sponsorship. That's way more important than mentorship. Mentorship is an easy thing that companies and other people do that makes them feel better. It actually doesn't change the dial. But more and more men are getting into the concept of sponsorship. I, personally, must promote men and women into positions of influence, and that's what can really make a difference.
Conservative
Rachael Thomas Conservative Lethbridge, AB
Awesome. Thank you much.
And my question for you is the same, as well.
Prof. Marjorie Griffin Cohen
Thank you. I appreciate that question.
I just want to echo what Professor Nesbitt has said because these are important words.
I do remember someone who had been my mentor once asking me.... I'm an economist, and so that was unusual way back when I became an economist. I said I didn't have any mentors; I had a lot of tormentors.
Prof. Marjorie Griffin Cohen
But anyway, I think that's what a lot of women experience.
I think what is incredibly important is the education of both boards and management, if that's what you're talking about there. But even at the level of tradespeople, you need to have education of employers. The unions are a lot better about this now, but you need to educate employers about what it means to hire women. You also need a critical mass of women. If you put one woman in there or two women in there, they're not going to make a difference, but if you have something near parity then something will happen.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Marilyn Gladu
Excellent.
Now we'll go to my colleague Ms. Malcolmson for seven minutes.
Sheila Malcolmson NDP Nanaimo—Ladysmith, BC
Thank you, Chair.
Thanks to both the witnesses.
To Professor Griffin Cohen, I'd like to talk a little more about the precarious work elements that you talked about in your testimony and submission.
We heard from Minister Morneau that Canadians should get used to job churn because it's going to happen, and we have to accept that. We're certainly hearing from young Canadians that there's an epidemic of precarious work in Canada, but part of the focus of this study is that this disproportionately affects young people and women—and 39% of Canadians between 15 and 19 are precariously employed.
Because of women's overrepresentation in the service industry, can you talk a bit more about our exposure to that in the context of free trade deals, and how this intersects with jobs and the economic security of women if we don't protect that security in trade deals?
Prof. Marjorie Griffin Cohen
This is quite complex for women now.
Before the free trade deals were put in place, it was pretty clear that women were going to be more narrowly channelled into certain kinds of occupations and certain kinds of sectors. This was because we were going to lose the manufacturing sector where women worked. So we did. We pretty much lost women in manufacturing, because they were heavily concentrated not just in the clothing and textile industries but also in boots and shoes and in small electronics. That was a fairly serious loss. A big change has also occurred with data processing, which then was.... We used to have laws whereby you had to do it here. Now we don't. It's all been taken over. So women lost jobs in important areas.
What's happening now is very hard to say, because I don't know what's going to happen with the trade agreements. We've all changed our economy so much over the past 25 years. It's going to be very scary to see what might happen in the future. I can't speculate on that until I see what is likely to happen.
I think we can probably worry about anything that would.... We have a very segregated employment system. It doesn't look like it, mostly for those of us who are in areas where men and women work together, but by and large it has become more intense. We have more precarious work. Unfortunately, although women have been increasingly represented in trade unions, that is beginning to decline too, because of the structure of the workforce. In a way, more precarious work means less protection.
Through this whole age of austerity, from the 1990s on, we've had less and less protection for workers from the employment standards acts within provinces and labour codes. That's been very hard on women, particularly for the very young teenage workers, because they haven't had those kinds of minimal protections.
NDP
Sheila Malcolmson NDP Nanaimo—Ladysmith, BC
Can you also speak a little more in relation to the Canada research chairs' discriminatory practices, as you've described them? What has been the impact of that discrimination on female students and young researchers?
Prof. Marjorie Griffin Cohen
I think that's a really good question. I haven't put my mind to it, on what it means for the researchers themselves, but I think there is a point there. There are fewer role models for young people, fewer people teaching them who have time to do research. That's the important part of these research chairs. People get a lot of time to do research on issues that are important to them, and they may or may not deal with women's issues. Nevertheless, students don't have access to this kind of significant research, so it will have an impact on them.
Thanks for raising that. I think that's another one I'll add when we get to mediation next time around.
NDP
Sheila Malcolmson NDP Nanaimo—Ladysmith, BC
Thank you for your work.
Richard Nesbitt, I appreciated your comment that to increase the number of women in leadership positions, we need to examine an uncompetitive or unacceptable maternity leave.
We heard earlier this week from Willem Adema from the OECD. He argued that parental leave needs to be used to change men's participation in child care. That might address some of the gender gap issues we have been seeing between men and women.
Can you talk a little more about what men can do to help remove the barrier to women's participation in the economy, around how we can encourage men to take that parental time off, not just increasing overall maternity leave but assigning it specifically to men, adding parental leave for men, and how that might change the balance in the workplace?
Prof. Richard Nesbitt
I'm not an expert in this area, but in the book that I'm doing with Barbara Annis, we talk about the fact that when I was in my thirties, this was my first exposure to why we need to focus on the position of women in leadership. I didn't care about maternity leave when I was about 35-years old until I had female employees who felt that it was an important issue. They convinced me that it was an important issue for me as well.
Again, this is part of the “fix the plumbing” issue. The content of your maternity policies has to be looked at very carefully. It's not just maternity policy, but also the way women return to work. Sixty per cent of university graduates are women, and a lot of companies today are trying to hire 40% to 50% women in their intake, but we have the problem that as they go up in seniority, we're losing women at each stage of the process.
You have to fix that plumbing. You have to figure out how to get experienced women back into the workforce once the maternity leave is over. Part of fixing that means allowing men to take an equal part in that parental leave as well, by the way.
In the financial services area, they have moved in that direction quite significantly. It's not seen as anything negative if a man takes time off for parental leave.
We need that to permeate the whole economy. First of all, I would recommend that the federal government enable that so it will permeate the organizations it controls, to set an example. I also think that the issue of maternity leave is often used by those in positions of power to say that it is the reason women can't move ahead. It's wrong.
The fact is that if a woman takes one year, two years, or three years off for maternity leave, in the overall context of a career of 30 years, it really has very little impact. It's these other social issues, like the reasons women don't come back from maternity leave and the reasons men are not sharing it, that are more important. I think the federal government should play a leadership role on that.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Marilyn Gladu
Thank you.
That's your time.
We're going to go to Mr. Fraser for seven minutes.
Liberal
Sean Fraser Liberal Central Nova, NS
Thanks very much to both of our witnesses for being here with us this morning.
Ms. Griffin Cohen I'll start with you. You had a couple of very interesting points.
First, on the discriminatory practices you you described pertaining to the Canada research chairs, I'm curious as to whether we see a difference between undergraduate institutions, where we have a greater proportion of women attending as students, and graduate institutions. Out east we have primarily undergraduate institutions. Essentially what I want to know is whether there are places that are doing this well.
Prof. Marjorie Griffin Cohen
There are places that are doing it reasonably well, but because the bar is so low, you can't really say that it's terrific.
I share your instinct that smaller institutions might have a harder time, but it turns out that in many cases they actually are better at it than larger institutions. You can see how they perform, detailed by institutions on the CRC website, and some do reasonably well.
Once again, our issue was with regard to everybody covered by human rights. They tend to focus mostly on women, which is too bad because there are other groups that are very poorly treated in terms of the CRC. Women should be better treated in universities.
Part of the problem is also that there's a big discrepancy between the granting agencies. Women are applying to certain kinds of grant agencies, those pertaining to Canadian social sciences and research in the humanities, as opposed to the science and the medical ones. Those granting agencies get much less money, so there's discrimination at that level as well.
Liberal
Sean Fraser Liberal Central Nova, NS
On the CRC website you mentioned, is there a qualitative analysis available as to why some are doing it better than others?
Prof. Marjorie Griffin Cohen
They only give you the raw numbers—that's all—and how they reach a target, which I want to stress is extraordinarily low.
Liberal
Sean Fraser Liberal Central Nova, NS
I do want to get to Mr. Nesbitt as well.
You mentioned the employment equity provision when we're dealing with major infrastructure spending as being a key thing. I had the benefit of sitting through a study on community benefit agreements, where gender diversity or employing different marginalized sectors of the population could be part of a competitive bidding process. Is that something you think could also work to help bring the numbers up?
Prof. Marjorie Griffin Cohen
I think there's a difference if you have a competitive bidding process with equity as being bid, as opposed to a compulsion that they have to do it. I would favour the compulsion. If you make everybody do it, then everybody bidding will have to account for that in some way.