Sure. I'll try to be brief.
My apologies if I misspoke, but I think what I said was that there are fewer women in computer science today than there were in 1989, and only marginally more in engineering. There has been an increase of women in STEM, but not at the level that we might have expected.
I would say two things, maybe three. One, why didn't it work? There were posters of astronauts and camps, and this and that. I would argue that there was no accountability. I would argue that organizations with levers of power, like Engineers Canada, which does the accreditations and so on, didn't have the right frameworks in place to actually move things forward. We see this a lot with good intentions that are not supported by clear targets, goals and accountability frameworks.
I think that is one big issue with women in science, technology, engineering and math, and the trades. If you do a Google image search on “carpenter”, you will get Jesus, carpenter ants and Karen Carpenter before you see a woman carpenter, I kid you not. Those are very powerful images, and we obviously have to work on getting people in.
To your point, and the link with gender-based violence, which I see as a continuum, many of the science, technology and engineering environments are still toxic. What you see there are retention issues, not just recruitment issues, and there's a lot more that could be said on that.
It feeds directly into our innovation entrepreneurship strategy and where the supports are, because there is way more money if you have a quantum computing start-up than if you have a services-oriented business in a small community. That just doesn't compute.