Thank you very much. I am really pleased to be here today and very grateful to have an opportunity to speak.
My name is Wendy Cukier, and I am a professor of entrepreneurship and strategy at Toronto Metropolitan University. I have also founded several start-ups, as well as social ventures. I've been on the board of a number of tech companies.
What I'm going to talk about today is primarily our work at the Women Entrepreneurship Knowledge Hub, and I welcome questions about that, but also the broader approach, which I really hope the committee will think about in deliberating on this issue.
Some of you may have seen the article that Morley Gunderson, an economist at the University of Toronto, and I published recently in The Globe and Mail. I reference that because I think we need a fundamental paradigm shift in Canada in our thinking about economic development and innovation. I say that as a former president of research and innovation at the university.
My observation is that a lot of our strategies are derivative. We look at what the U.S. does and we say, “Oh, our productivity is lower. Our investments in research are lower. We don't invest enough in skills”, without understanding the differences in the economy. In the United States, 50% of employment is with large business, and 50% of private sector employment is with small business. In Canada, large businesses account for only 10% of private sector employment. Small and medium enterprises account for 90%. When we think about where we're putting our money, what we're investing in and whom we're supporting, we have to be laser-focused on small and medium enterprises. That's the first thing I wanted to say.
The second thing I wanted to say is that the Women Entrepreneurship Knowledge Hub, which has 10 sites across the country, very deliberately took an ecosystem focus. Rather than just looking at supporting organizations targeting women entrepreneurs, we look at what financial institutions are doing, what the regional development agencies are doing, what the Business Development Bank of Canada is doing, what our legislative policies and practices are, and what large businesses are doing. They say they support women entrepreneurs, but they don't dedicate any of their expenditures.
That's the other thing I wanted to say, because from what I've heard of the testimony, quite rightly, there's been a lot of discussion about how to dedicate funds, specifically for women entrepreneurs. What I would suggest to you is that the bigger and the more impactful strategy is to remove the barriers in the mainstream funding, because there's way more money in the government and in the private sector that we could be leveraging to support women entrepreneurs.
Out of our research have come a few insights that I think are fairly important. There are still limitations in the data. The disaggregated data that people have referenced is super important. We are encouraged that, based on the data that is available, it does appear that women are gaining traction both in terms of being majority owners of businesses and also in terms of narrowing gaps. Women are now almost as likely as men entrepreneurs to export. If you look at innovation, women are actually more likely to innovate in terms of products.
We still know that women-led businesses are underfinanced, that they are smaller and that they tend to be concentrated in some sectors and not in others. That's very much a function of a long-standing problem around the under-representation of women in science, technology, engineering and math. I've been working on women in technology for 30 years. I can tell you that today there are fewer women in computer science and only marginally more in engineering since the Montreal massacre. It's moved from 20% to 24%, in terms of women in STEM. That has an impact, obviously, on women's ownership of high-growth companies, which we tend to be preoccupied with, but it also means that women are excluded from strategies that focus on tech start-ups and tech incubators—tech, tech, tech.
Those are just a few key points that I wanted to make.
The final one I'd like to end on—and this has been said by others, but we have the data—is that Black women, indigenous women, racialized women, immigrant women, women with disabilities, those who identify as 2SLGBTQ+ and so on face more barriers, and we can talk more about that.