Status of Women committee  Money is a very powerful incentive.

Status of Women committee  I think we have to get away from.... It feels really good to support little kids in science. We all get warm and fuzzy around that, but that little kid in science will grow up, and 20 years from now she's going to be asking for venture capital. You know what? The same corporate leader who funds that science camp is not going to give her venture capital because she doesn't look like she can handle a start-up.

Status of Women committee  There's a very good study that came out in 2014 that looked at STEM through a gender lens. It looked at who was responsible for increasing participation, at which level, and what things worked. It came out of the U.K. One of the things it identified as not working was targeted programs for girls.

Status of Women committee  In participation rates at the undergraduate level?

Status of Women committee  Both medicine and law are second entry, so an undergraduate degree is required. Yes, those numbers have gone up. There's a great article that I would recommend to everybody, which is called “When Women Stopped Coding”. It describes the increase in participation rates of women in law, medicine, life sciences, and computer science until the mid 1980s, when the participation rate really dropped in computer science, relative to medicine and law, which are now pretty stable.

Status of Women committee  I think television had a lot to do with it. I think girls would see themselves potentially as a doctor. It was a desirable lifestyle. However, if you look at the retention rates in law and medicine, that's something quite different. If you look at the participation rates in high school, girls are participating in high school at very equivalent rates, except in physics.

Status of Women committee  I'm familiar with a little about some of the things that go on in Scandinavian countries. They have been very intentional around things like shared parenting, extensive parental leave, and some cultural changes in terms of making society more equitable. Interestingly, I would say that those changes have not been absorbed by the university sector in Scandinavia to the extent that they should have been.

Status of Women committee  Yes, but they're still coming up in a culture all around them that says we value girls for the way they look, where Kim Kardashian is the most followed person on Instagram. If we had a culture that said it doesn't matter whether you're male or female, and we raised four-year-olds in that culture, we would see people achieving their potential, not saying, “I don't look like anybody out there.

Status of Women committee  No. We're talking about the fact that society has to change. We have to get away from focusing on its being a problem with the kids. It's not a problem with the kids. It's a problem with us. It's a problem with media. It's a problem when you look at who is in power. When I walked into this building coming from Toronto, I'll tell you right now, it's a very white building.

Status of Women committee  I hear a lot of young women in science saying, “I don't want the position just because I'm a woman.” I don't think anybody ever got a position just because they were a woman, except maybe those very specialized programs, and then there was a stigma associated with it, which is a problem.

Status of Women committee  I use that in terms of the four designated groups. We've had a lot of discussions at Ryerson on what that means in terms of people self-identifying: whether they need to self-identify if it doesn't have an impact, or the fact that people who have mental health disabilities may not self-identify.

Status of Women committee  Okay. How do we address this? We address this through systemic, organizational, structural change. Last week, I was in Washington, D.C., at the invitation of NSERC, to learn about the SEA change initiative, which is based on the Athena SWAN initiative in the U.K., which has been very effective in shifting institutional culture.

Status of Women committee  If you look, for example, at the census data the U.S. collects, which is disaggregated way beyond gender to socio-economic group, ethnicity, and things like parental levels of education, that's a good model in terms of the data they collect. The challenges exist to some extent between provincial and federal jurisdictions.

Status of Women committee  You legislate it. If you want to change it overnight, you legislate it and you tie funding to it. We do that for people with disabilities, right? We have legislation that says you take out the steps and you put in a ramp. We don't ask people in wheelchairs to try harder or lean in.

Status of Women committee  I didn't know that it was a girl-boy thing. I just knew at that time that it was not fair. It's not a gender issue. It's a human rights issue. It's not fair. I couldn't advocate for myself at that time, and no one else seemed to notice because that was the norm. That was the way the system worked, yet, to quote somebody I have a lot or respect for, I “persisted”.