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.