Thank you very much. I'm honoured to be invited to present at this committee.
My name is Tamara Franz-Odendaal. I'm a full professor at Mount Saint Vincent University in the biology department. I'm also the NSERC chair for women in science and engineering for Atlantic Canada and have held this position since 2011. I serve on the boards of CCWESTT and Science Atlantic. The views I present today are my own and are based on my experience as a woman in science and through my chair position.
You heard last week from my colleague Dr. Catherine Mavriplis, the NSERC women in science and engineering chair for Ontario, so I will take this opportunity to raise points different from those raised in last week's session.
In 2011, I launched a program called WISEatlantic that aims to provide girls in grades 7 to 9 access to female role models in SETT and also to provide professional development opportunities to women in SETT, such as the ones we've just heard about from Margaret-Ann Armour. Through these activities, in just a few years we have enabled 3,000 girls to meet with 250 women in SETT and have provided professional development opportunities to almost 500 women in these fields.
Today I would like to make just four points.
The first point concerns maternity leave. I bring to your attention today the position of post-doctoral researchers. I am an immigrant to Canada and came to Canada with my husband in 2003 to complete a post-doctoral research appointment. This post-doc period is a critical and essential training period that is required after one's Ph.D. if one hopes to secure an academic position. During this period, I, like many other women, chose to start a family.
A recent national post-doctoral survey highlighted that there are currently inconsistencies in the classification of post-docs by provincial governments and institutions. Post-docs may be considered employees, trainees, students, or independent contractors. Because of the financial pressures I felt, both as a newcomer to Canada and since no EI was available to me, and because of the intense work pressures to not stop the productivity of my research career, my daughter went into full-time day care at three months of age.
The decision to start a family while on an academic track invariably takes place during the latter part of a Ph.D. during one's post-doc—typically a three- to six-year period—which is also a time when one is interviewing for jobs, or during the very early years of a faculty position. These are all periods that are extremely stressful, particularly when one feels the additional burden of needing to have a valid and continual publication record.
Not all universities have stop-the-clock policies, and not all funding agencies do either. Universities and funding agencies need clear guidelines for the options for female researchers who fall pregnant during these critical periods. At present, too many women are afraid to tell their supervisors that they are pregnant because of the responses they will receive. I have heard this first-hand from several women in the last few years. They are too afraid to reveal during the hiring process that they have a family. Post-doctoral researchers are our future researchers, and we should ensure they are treated fairly, especially with respect to maternity leave.
This brings me to my second point, which is about unconscious bias. Unconscious bias training with respect to gender in SETT is not a rigorous part of the training provided to hiring or promotion committee members within the university establishment. It's also not a rigorous part of the training provided to our future science and math teachers.
The reason I bring this up within the university setting is that at the current rates of promotion of female faculty, it will take over 800 years in some disciplines to reach equal male-female ratios. At present in Canada, fewer than 15% of STEM full professors are female. Studies have shown that having female professors in mathematics, as in the other STEM disciplines, does positively affect the female students in the class and has negligible impacts on the male students, who do not face similar stereotype threats.
Educational institutions should provide rigorous unconscious bias training to committees that ultimately make the decisions about the diversity within the departments. There are many improvements that could be made. Capturing the breadth of the candidate pool during the hiring process and requiring that institutions report the diversity of faculty in each degree program in their annual report are some examples. In addition, university and college programs are subject to periodic review, and perhaps the body that oversees the quality of SETT programs, including accreditation, should be mandated to look at the diversity of faculty within departments.
The reason I bring up unconscious bias training among our science and math teachers is that I'm still hearing from female university students that teachers are steering them away from SETT disciplines. At present, the responsibility for career awareness has been sidelined to the role of guidance counsellors, who have little time to keep up with what employers are looking for or to make themselves aware of the myriad of SETT career options that are available to youth. They do not realize the unique skill sets that women bring to these disciplines and that employers are starting to look for.
Outreach programs become all the more important when teachers and parents are not aware of the opportunities within the SETT fields for female students. If we can provide better STEM career awareness within schools, and train our teachers about unconscious bias and stereotype threat, I believe we will have more female students pursuing these careers.
I will end today by highlighting the work of NSERC's chairs for women in science and engineering program, established in 1996. At present, there are only five chairs for the whole of Canada. The work we do has a high impact. We are each serving a large geographical area, often in multiple provinces. Each discipline—science, math, engineering, computer science—faces different challenges.
There is much work that needs to be done at the grade 7 to 9 level, at the university or educational institution level, and in the workplace. If every university in Canada had a women in STEM chair who could advise on hiring and promotion and run professional development programs such as the ones I mentioned today, I'm confident that we would see significant changes in the number of female STEM researchers at our universities.
Thank you for allowing me to speak today. I'm happy share any of the studies I've referred to.