Mr. Speaker, certainly in my experience I have seen a lot. When I first started, there were only 13% in engineering who were women. I was always building a washroom every place I worked, because there were no women's washrooms in any place. I was usually the only woman in the room at any given time.
I have lived through a bunch of different things. Affirmative action came into place when I was with Dow Chemical in an office in the middle of Michigan. There was a U.S. quota system, which was actually disastrous, because women were not necessarily promoted on merit. That was not the way to do it. I went on to work in various ways in my position as director of engineering and construction at Suncor to try to encourage the hiring of women. We can really start to see the difference by making sure that we have targets when trying to get gender parity in terms of who we are hiring.
When it comes to getting women promoted through the ranks, I was promoted to the point that I was overseeing 254 plants globally at Dow, and I was reporting to the people who reported to the board. I was one of the few women at that level.
When choices are made about board appointments and executive appointments, people tend to pick those they know and those they are networking with, and women are not always in that network.
One of the initiatives Status of Women put together was keeping a list of prominent and excellent women for promotion to boards of executives so that when opportunities and openings became available, nobody could say that they could not find any good women, because there was always a great list. I think that is a super idea.