Evidence of meeting #59 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 business.
A recording is available from Parliament.
President and Chief Executive Officer, Actua
Thank you for your support of that initiative, but I also think the impact of having you as a woman engineer in the role you're in is very significant. We need more women engineers as members of Parliament.
President and Chief Executive Officer, Actua
What can the federal government do? I think it is absolutely essential that this early engagement continues to be supported, and that we look at it not just from an educational perspective, because obviously we then get mixed up in the whole provincial/federal jurisdictional issues. That aside, we need to look at it from a skill and competency development perspective. Girls, as you said, at eight, nine, and ten, are extremely interested. They're still interested at 13, but there's just a lot of pressure in other areas and a lot of negative messaging about who can do science, technology, and engineering. A lot of peer influence is going on. We're hearing from girls how their peers are talking about these subject areas—and how they're being discouraged by their female and male friends is also very influential.
We need to not only engage them, but also we need to look at.... We know a lot now, we know the factors that influence them. We know they need role models, we know they need to have coaching, we know that when programs for girls are delivered, they need to be safe spaces, they need to be spaces where girls can develop the skills that some of them are lacking through other means, through play and risk-taking, taking things apart, putting them back together, learning that failure is not horrible, that it has a very good use, and all the other good things they love, such as collaboration and creativity.
What can you do? You need to invest in these programs and recognize that they have to start early—it's not good enough to start in high school—and look at the specific nature of their programming. It's not just about bringing girls together and giving them hands-on science, but that we need to be making sure that we're talking to them about what they're going to encounter and the challenges they're going to face. I think we've shied away from that, maybe because we don't want to put ideas in their head before they have them, but the reality is that six- and seven-year-olds know the messaging, if you ask them. Having open conversations makes a big difference.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Marilyn Gladu
Ms. Amundsen, my next question has to do with the construction industry. I was in the construction industry for a long time, so I do see the chronic problems there with sexism, harassment, and it being a very unfriendly environment for women to come into. That said, we're looking to get more women in skilled trades. In this regard, I was very interested when you said there's no pay equity gap, and I think that is my—
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Marilyn Gladu
—perception in the unionized area; that's right. I was astonished that you're not eligible for funding from Status of Women, so I'm sure Ms. Malcolmson and I will take that to question period. However, in terms of what we can do to help promote women into the skilled trades, what are the specific things you think we should be helping with?
Workforce Development, Canada's Building Trades Unions
There's a lot being done out there. There are a lot of fantastic organizations, and the government has been very supportive of the work that organizations are doing to create awareness around opportunities in the skilled trades. We go out to schools. We talk to kids. We talk to parents. We talk to teachers. We do media profiles. We do all that we can to create that awareness.
I think the awareness is great. I was going to say don't quote me on this, but obviously I am going to be quoted on this. Now we're sort of shifting our focus to the retention piece. I think that women and girls are interested in these jobs. It's just that they get into this environment and say “whoa”.
The time has expired for us to be saying that you just have to have a thick skin and deal with it. I think that's wrong, and some tradeswomen are conditioned to believe that you just have to be really tough and you just have to handle it.
There's a major workplace culture issue. There are a lot of accommodations that can be made. There are child care issues. There are pregnancy issues in the trades. I think that changing those barriers, as well as working with contractors to provide a foot in the door so that contractors hire women—we're doing that sort of work with partners in other organizations—takes a multi-pronged approach.
I think the awareness piece and the interest piece are doing well. You see a lot on women in the skilled trades these days.
President and Chief Executive Officer, Actua
The context issue is affecting our work far more than it did even five years ago. When women and girls go into the fields of tech and engineering, the number of stories and the high-profile media stories about how awful the culture still is for women is now re-affecting our work. Parents are saying, “Why would I encourage my daughter to go into that?” Girls are hearing those stories because they're very aware.
My answer to that question in the past would have been, “Actua really only focuses on girls aged 6 to 16. We can't do it all,” but now that is so heavily weighing on our work, we have to do it. One can't happen without the other.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Marilyn Gladu
You talked about the training that you're doing on diversity to try to address the behaviours that are happening in construction. I know that we give lots of training. The glazed-over expression that we got from the guys...and when they got back out in the field, nothing had changed.
Could you tell me which things you're doing that you think are effective in changing the behaviour?
Workforce Development, Canada's Building Trades Unions
I don't know if we have that master recipe yet. I can give you, though, a Cole's Notes version of what we're trying to accomplish here.
Buildforce Canada received funding a year ago from Status of Women Canada to do a project on tools for implementing respectful workplaces, training, and policy. We're working with them—and they're working with a bunch of other groups, as well—to make sure that we don't reinvent the wheel but complement each other's work.
I think it's really powerful for all of us to come together and to come up with solutions. What I would like to do is to take those champions that we recruit in the industry, whoever they are—union members, contractors, employers, leaders, government— and provide them with the tools that Buildforce Canada comes up with and the training, test them out, see how they're working, and go back and forth on that to create the best solution.
Conservative
NDP
Sheila Malcolmson NDP Nanaimo—Ladysmith, BC
Thank you, Chair.
I'm going to take this up with the minister.
You were extremely clear, from the perspective of Canada's Building Trades Unions, about the barriers to your being able to participate in the Status of Women funding. I'm disappointed, given what I've heard. I hadn't heard that story until this morning from you. It is impossible to reconcile that with what I've heard Status of Women staff and the present minister say, which is that it was the labour movement that kept the women's movement alive in Canada during the 10 years the Conservatives were in power. That kind of lauding of your work is inconsistent with—
Workforce Development, Canada's Building Trades Unions
There's a disconnect there.
NDP
Sheila Malcolmson NDP Nanaimo—Ladysmith, BC
There's a total disconnect.
I hear you. Thank you for being so clear, and I'll definitely take it up.
On a happier note, my friend Hilary Peach is a boilermaker. She's my age, and she's been in the work for a long time. She says the thing that's actually changed the workplace dynamic more than anything is a lot of young men raised by strong feminist single mothers. They're the ones who call out their fellow workers, and Hilary is like, “Oh, my God, I've been trying to teach these guys about sexism for decades.” Now it's these young guys on the job, who are, thankfully, taking the load off her. That's not a federal responsibility.
I want to talk with you a little bit, Lindsay, from Canada's Building Trades Unions' side, about the shift that we're starting to see at the grassroots level with organized labour building leave for victims of domestic violence into their collective agreements. As well, in some provinces, such as Manitoba with its NDP government, and also I think in B.C. with some private members' bills there, and I think in Ontario, the same cause is being picked up. Last week in my community, I talked to some of the employees at women's shelters in Nanaimo as well as to the police, the RCMP. They were very clear that sometimes work is the most stable place for a woman who's experiencing domestic violence, and that if she can't get leave to get her kids and her rent and a new place to live organized, then she has the choice between returning to a dangerous situation and falling deeper into poverty, and that's a terrible choice.
Would you like to see a recommendation from this committee around domestic leave provisions being considered as one of the tools that we can look at to protect women's economic security in times of violence?
Workforce Development, Canada's Building Trades Unions
I don't know if anybody would say no to that; maybe they would. But certainly I think women who are experiencing domestic violence should be able to take leave. I know there's some discussion that maybe they should take sick leave and those sorts of things. But I would say why not? Anything that protects women, especially around these issues, I think, is appropriate.
That is not something I've been working on in my files, although the beauty of having these Build Together, Women of the Building Trades programs across the country is that I can easily tap into members working at a local level with local unions, with employers, and with contractors, who can champion these sorts of things. It's definitely worth taking up.
NDP
Sheila Malcolmson NDP Nanaimo—Ladysmith, BC
The BC Building Trades has been great about amplifying the Build Together campaign. It has great visuals and materials. It's very positive, again, about being able to visualize what it looks like to have women in the field and to change young minds.
I will turn now to Actua and Ms. Flanagan. We're pleased to see innovation and infrastructure spending in the federal budget. But one of the concerns I have, because women are not yet represented in some of the infrastructure fields, is that the spending could leave women further behind. This committee has had testimony from a couple of witnesses on exactly that link. Meg Gingrich from the Steelworkers told the committee that infrastructure spending should be done using a gendered lens so that it doesn't create jobs only for men, and Professor Kathleen Lahey told us that one reason Canada has fallen to number 25 in terms of gender equality is the focus on infrastructure spending that traditionally benefits male jobs.
Can you talk a bit about the importance of infrastructure spending that would have an explicit gender-based analysis, so that women aren't being left further behind and we can protect space for the next generation of workers?
President and Chief Executive Officer, Actua
That is not my area of expertise at all. What I can say is that we obviously would be supportive of a gender lens on anything. The hope and the optimism that we feel.... I've never felt more optimistic than I do right now, and I've been in this field for a long time. There's a much clearer understanding of the need to engage girls, not just for gender parity's sake but because it will improve our standing across all of the innovation measures. I feel that's being well understood within the corporate sector and within the federal government.
President and Chief Executive Officer, Actua
Yes. We're very optimistic.
NDP
Sheila Malcolmson NDP Nanaimo—Ladysmith, BC
Have you been doing, on your side, any work with a particular focus on financial literacy and indigenous women? We heard from Pauktuutit, the Inuit women's advocacy organization, that it found that numeracy, bookkeeping, and financial literacy in the north represented a particular gap. It's calling for entrepreneurship programs that are particularly targeted around indigenous women. Is that an area that you've been working on?
President and Chief Executive Officer, Actua
Yes, absolutely. We have a national indigenous outreach program that annually engages 35,000 indigenous youth, with first nations, Inuit, and Métis working in partnership with 220 indigenous communities. That's for boys and girls.
In the north in particular, we have 50 locations across the three territories and Labrador. There, the connections to economic development are so much closer, but are completely isolated, in that kids have no idea of the economic development opportunities that are happening in their communities. Actua is playing a significant bridging role there to talk to boys and girls about who these people are in their backyards, what the opportunities are, and what skills they need to build so they can not just understand this but become the leaders in those economic development projects.
From a financial literacy perspective, that's in everything that we do. Because we're very focused on experiential learning, we don't want to develop just science and tech skills, as schools do that quite well. We want to have youth apply those to real-world contexts. That's how the innovation muscle develops: when they actually are applying skills to something they care about. With the financial literacy piece, they're like, “Why do I need math?” In our projects, we will have them building something, for example, but they'll have to do a budget, and they'll have to learn about how money works in a business.
Obviously this is in the context of a nine-year-old or a ten-year-old, but just that first exposure.... They've never been told what financial literacy even is and why math matters and how that would affect their lives. That application is incredibly important. Then we do all kinds of other more detailed financial literacy pieces, but that first exposure is important, and it's relevant everywhere, and obviously we do it with indigenous youth as well.
Conservative
Liberal
Sean Fraser Liberal Central Nova, NS
Thanks very much to both of you for being here. I really enjoyed your testimony.
I'll jump right into it because we have limited time.
We've heard from a number of different panels, including today, about the importance of encouraging women's participation in STEM and growth industries. One of the things that we don't often talk about is encouraging women to join other professions within those sectors.
Recently in my own community I met with an start-up tech company. They said they were dying for people, but not just computer programmers. They said they needed people who have a B.A. and can be good technical writers, and people who have creative minds, particularly in the marketing industry.
Are there things we can do to shift the focus away from solely engineers and mathematicians in order to recognize that there are growth opportunities in those sectors generally and to draw from the immense pool of talented women going through our post-secondary education system now who are disproportionately represented, particularly in university degree programs, and could take part in these sectors? Are there things that you think the federal government could do to tap into that resource?
That's for whoever wants to tackle it.
