Veterans Affairs committee  Thank you for your question. I'm going to answer in English. This is something that we have observed, as well, in our reviews of some of the literature. It's more so in the U.S., where there's a bit more information and data that women are twice as likely to be at risk for suicide.

Veterans Affairs committee  I apologize if it wasn't clear from my remarks that the Athena project is a study that we are just embarking upon. At the moment we are recruiting women veterans from the CAF and the RCMP to form a working group to help us design the study. We hope to have findings 16 to 18 months from now.

Veterans Affairs committee  This notion of invisibility is something that we've also heard about anecdotally in conversations we've had with women veterans and with partners in other organizations. This committee has also heard about their not feeling like a veteran or not identifying as a veteran, or a reluctance to do so.

Veterans Affairs committee  Thank you for the invitation to speak to you today. Over the past few weeks, the committee has heard about critical gaps in data collection and research on women veterans' health across many areas. Researchers at the Atlas Institute have observed this as well through a recent research gap analysis that we conducted, which also prompted a need for us to identify specific areas for further investigation.