Science and Research committee  You could probably count most of engineering and physics, which are the last bastions where women are not dominating in the academic fields. This is because you have more female graduates in most other disciplines, compared to engineering and physics.

Science and Research committee  I couldn't tell you about the rest of the world in terms of publications, but if you read any publication by Vincent Larivière, I'm sure you will find that women publish less than men. I think it's a question of choice. This is something that nobody has really had a look at. Many women will take the decision to not write another paper over the weekend because they want to be driving to ski lessons or swimming lessons.

Science and Research committee  As part of our studies, we looked at the impact of scientific publication on salaries, and noticed that, quite often, a more research-oriented career, resulting in greater scientific output, has an impact on salary. During the pandemic, women published less, but men published more, because women took on a lot of child care during the school years.

Science and Research committee  I must mention that this is not something that is new in Quebec. Université Laval had this in 1986, so they were the precursors. What happens is that, when a woman comes back to work after maternity leave, eventually asks for a promotion to the next rank and obtains that rank, the promotion is granted retroactively to compensate for the maternity leave.

Science and Research committee  I presume so. I was quite young in 1986, so I couldn't tell you exactly what was in the mind of the rector of Université Laval at the time. I suspect it was to remove the penalties that women encountered by taking maternity leave.

Science and Research committee  Thank you. I'll be making my statement in French. Thank you for this invitation to appear before the Standing Committee on Science and Research. It is a great privilege for me to have the chance to share with you my research findings on wage inequality. As a specialist in the management and economics of science, technology and innovation, I quickly became interested in the differences between men and women in science.

Industry committee  I'm not from Statistics Canada, so I can't actually give you the nitty-gritty of the process, but I believe there were five ministries or agencies that were funding it. Once the biotechnology strategy was abandoned and moved toward more science and technology, there was no longer money to fund those surveys.

Industry committee  You mean the biotechnology StatsCan survey.

Industry committee  It's considered a survey by Statistics Canada because it has a response rate of over 70%. It was not built as a longitudinal survey, so we have made a lot of effort to follow companies throughout because a company might answer in 1999 and then for some bizarre reason not answer the survey in 2001 and then come back in 2003 or 2005.

Industry committee  Which survey are you talking about?

Industry committee  The biotech survey is an extremely rich survey, and I lobbied quite a lot of people to try to fund the 2007 survey of biotechnology. We could have had 10 years of looking very deeply into an industry in Canada. Unfortunately, I couldn't help to raise money for the survey. These types of studies allow us to examine how policy and various environments have an effect, because during the study we have done we passed through the crises of 2001 and 2007.

Industry committee  It is not very clear in my graph, but you begin to see a drop in citations after about five patents.

Industry committee  Public funding has an exponential effect on the number of articles produced and the number of subsequent citations. The bigger the investment, the more students are paid to do the research and the more often large research groups are created, which results in further developments or a broader network.

Industry committee  If you don't have a Canadian company that can make use of these patents, then they might as well be sold to someone who can actually use the patents and create value that will eventually benefit Canadians. If we just stop the selling of these patents and nobody does anything with them, then they're actually wasted for the world.

Industry committee  Just very quickly, we surveyed a number of firms in nanotechnology, and what they have told us is that they strategically patent in the markets where they want to expand. They might patent a compound in a number of countries, but not in other countries. They can't afford to patent in every single jurisdiction, so they strategically post their patents throughout the world.