Status of Women Committee on Oct. 31st, 2017

[Prof. Imogen Coe]

That's exactly what SEA change or Athena SWAN does, at least in the university system, and you can move it into other sectors as well. There's another thing in the U.K. called the WISE campaign, which brings education and industry and business together to create this very diverse pipeline into the STEM workforce.

If you look at SEA change or Athena SWAN, you see the rubrics are developed by each institution or each division that is seeking cultural change. It requires a collector, let's say, a faculty of engineering.... Let's say a faculty of science because otherwise the engineers will get offended because they're both science.

The faculty of science has to reflect back on itself and say we only have 15% women in this faculty. Why is that? Where are they? Why is that happening? Is it because when we look at our pools of applicants for positions, there are no women in them? Okay, we're going to address that. How are we going to address that? Then there's going to be a plan. It could be that we have 50% women in our pools of applicants but we're only hiring men. Okay, we have another issue there, whether that's a hiring committee...or it could be that we hire women and they leave after two years. There's another issue there.

The SEA change or Athena SWAN program—it's called SAGE in Australia—requires a division or a unit to reflect back on itself and collect its own set of metrics, and then say we're going to change that. We only have 15%. In three years we're going to go to 30%. How are we going to do that? First of all, we're going to make sure we have a much richer pool. How are we going to do that? We're going to target these places, then we're going to make sure that our hiring committees really understand deeply what equity and diversity means, and then we're going to train them and not just send them to do an online module. We're going to really train them. We're going to give them cultural competencies and we're also going to put in a series of processes and policies to make sure that we don't lose women within their first three years, or whatever.

That could be like what I've done at Ryerson, which are programs that help support faculty and work-life balance. It could also be things like not having departmental meetings at four o'clock on a Thursday afternoon because people have to go to pick up kids. Every group has to reflect back. This is why it puts the responsibility back on us, not on women. If you're one of the 15% and you got hired, now you have to just tough it out even though there are all these other factors.

The university must reflect back and then develop its own rubric. That's going to be different for different places, which is why the responsibility comes back to you. But if the university can come back in three years and say, “Look, we went from 15% to 30%” and then a national organization says, “Wow, okay you get a silver award”, then Ryerson University gets a silver and University of Toronto says, “Damn it, we're going to get gold because we can't let the people down the road have....” Then it spreads.

But it's very difficult, and this is why many programs fail. It's very difficult to have a national set of rubrics.

[Rachael Thomas, Conservative, Lethbridge, AB]

Thank you.

I have another question for you, and I've heard this from a number of women I've talked to from different fields, but particularly with regard to the STEM and any of the fields you might call non-traditional for women. We talk about equal numbers of men and women entering into these fields, and we say that will result in equity or fairness. That's how we use the definition of fairness. It means 50% women, 50% men.

I actually have a lot of women coming to me and saying that's not necessarily true. Perhaps only 30% of women are interested in entering this field, and more men are interested in that field. Is it not a woman's choice to determine what field she's interested in? Why should there be 50% necessarily interested in this or that field? I've had women tell me they feel as though they are being forced or rushed into some of these fields that they don't necessarily want to be considered for.

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Pam Damoff]

Rachael, your time is up. You'll have to hold your answer for that.

We're moving to Ms. Jordan for five minutes.

[Bernadette Jordan, Liberal, South Shore—St. Margarets, NS]

Thank you, Dr. Coe, for your fascinating presentation.

I'm going to refer back to last week's testimony. We heard from Dr. Armstrong with the Canadian Association of University Teachers, who was talking specifically about women in academia. I'd like your take on a couple of the challenges she brought forward. One of the things she said was that more stable funding to universities will help women who are traditionally in casual positions, because there isn't....

Do you see more stable funding being targeted funding, or is that something you don't agree with?

[Prof. Imogen Coe]

I'm not quite sure what more stable funding means, because universities are funded under the provinces.

[Bernadette Jordan, Liberal, South Shore—St. Margarets, NS]

Increases in funding...?

[Prof. Imogen Coe]

Certainly, going back to the fundamental science review, we need increases in research funding and a long hard look at how that funding is being allocated. We know there's gender bias. CIHR and NSERC are getting a handle on that, and they're doing a reasonable job, but the rates of funding are so low that it's a very precarious environment for research funding. The universities are funded through grants from the provinces and tuition fees. How they use those funds is going to vary among different universities.

The universities have been around for a thousand years. They're like the church. They're both resistant and resilient. They're very resistant to change, and they're resilient, which is why they've been around for a long time. There are systems and policies in there that really need to be changed, updated, and brought into an era that is supportive of human rights and not particularly.... It's not just science. Disciplines like economics and philosophy are very male-dominated.

It's a combination of the funding and the cultural change. You can tie the two together.

[Bernadette Jordan, Liberal, South Shore—St. Margarets, NS]

The other point she made that I thought was quite interesting was that there's been a movement to fund research for women in STEM. Her comments were that, traditionally, women research in what she called the “softer sciences”, social sciences. Would it not be more beneficial to put the money where the women are than to put it where we want them to go?

[Prof. Imogen Coe]

It comes back to this. We're not talking about putting women where they don't want to go. We're talking about getting rid of the barriers. It's like we're trying to make people who use wheelchairs walk up steps. We're trying to take out barriers to allow everybody the opportunity to participate. Seriously, it's about having all of the talent at the table.

We need to fund everybody where they are now, and maybe in those disciplines—I don't know which ones—where there are more women, such as nursing, we need to be looking at the barriers to full participation by men in those pathways, because there are barriers. We know there are some really serious barriers to full participation for women and under-represented groups, and LGBTQ, and for certain our first nations, in terms of participation in STEM pathways.

Maybe we need to be putting money into a very explicit attempt to identify and remove those barriers, and then once we can be sure all those barriers are gone, let's have a look and see who's participating. It will be up and down, whatever, but first of all, it's an economic imperative that we want all of the talent at the table. We're stupid as a nation if we don't get that, so we'd better get all of the barriers out of the way.

There's a young woman I ran into at Waterloo who is from the Institute for Quantum Computing, a post-doctoral fellow, a really, really smart, highly trained young woman working in quantum computing, the field of the future. She's leaving it because she's had enough of the harassment. She's leaving it. That's intellectual capacity leaving. That's crazy.

It's about having all the talent at the table, and I think it's a reasonable expectation that any human endeavour is going to have, more or less, a participation rate that looks like humanity. If we don't have a participation rate that more or less looks like humanity, for whatever we're looking at in a particular location, then we have a problem.

Research funding needs more support in Canada. There's no doubt about that and that's going to help everybody, but it needs to be done in a way that's equitable and that promotes and embraces diversity explicitly and intentionally.

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Pam Damoff]

That's your time.

We probably have time for three minutes, if you have questions on the Conservative side.

[Rachael Thomas, Conservative, Lethbridge, AB]

I do.

I'm interested in this word “fair”. We often use it.

[Prof. Imogen Coe]

Sorry...?

[Rachael Thomas, Conservative, Lethbridge, AB]

You used the word “fair” in your presentation. You said we want things to be fair.

I looked it up, and here's what it said. It is defined as being in accordance with the rules or standards, legitimate. That's one. It also means without cheating or trying to achieve unjust advantage, so if we're using the word “fair”.... I believe we should have a fair or just world, and that's what we should be striving toward.

If we have a field to which 100 men apply and 25 women apply, but we have to receive the same number of men and women in order to be fair, and if, let's say, in this field, from the 100 male applications and the 25 female applications, we are going to receive 50, that means that all 25 women will be received, and 25 men out of the 100 men will be received.

Is that fair?

[Prof. Imogen Coe]

With all due respect, that's a ridiculous question.

[Rachael Thomas, Conservative, Lethbridge, AB]

But those are quotas, and that is what you defined as fair.

[Prof. Imogen Coe]

We can argue semantics if you want, but—

[Rachael Thomas, Conservative, Lethbridge, AB]

My question is simple. Is it fair?

[Prof. Imogen Coe]

What is the nature of the program that you're talking about? What is the nature of the—

[Rachael Thomas, Conservative, Lethbridge, AB]

You don't have to understand the nature of the program.

[Prof. Imogen Coe]

Yes, you do. Of course you do. Everything has a context around it. Everything is context-dependent.

[Rachael Thomas, Conservative, Lethbridge, AB]

The fairness will depend on the context...?

[Prof. Imogen Coe]

Nothing happens in a vacuum. We're not living in a vacuum.

[Rachael Thomas, Conservative, Lethbridge, AB]

Okay, so you're saying that fairness then is determined by the context.

[Prof. Imogen Coe]

I believe that equal access to opportunity is a human rights issue, and I believe that we do not have equal access to opportunity, at least in the STEM pathways, and that we need to be seeking that because that is fair. We need to be giving people access to achieve their full potential. How we do that and the mechanisms whereby we do that are going to vary, and they may involve quotas, but those are going to be dependent on the nature and the context of that particular topic that we're looking at.

[Rachael Thomas, Conservative, Lethbridge, AB]

It's subjective fairness.

Thank you.