Status of Women committee  Thank you for that question, Greg. We're working on exactly that. For example, one of the things we're going to do is meet with search firms that guide universities in hiring for senior positions to see what we can learn from them about unconscious bias, about barriers that are

Status of Women committee  Male-designed playgrounds, exactly. In fact, I'm really pleased to share with you that last fall, at our national Universities Canada meeting, we brought in someone to train us in unconscious bias. There were about 60 university presidents—obviously, many of them males—who took

Status of Women committee  Thank you. I'd be happy to talk about that. I do sit on an advisory committee to the YWCA Halifax. It's a program working with very marginalized, low-income women, trying to help them develop some very basic skills—confidence, resumé writing, even dressing for interviews—to move

Status of Women committee  —who are trying to make a life for themselves.

Status of Women committee  The studies that I've seen suggest that it can be a little more awkward for a man to sponsor a woman. There are a lot of cultural things around.... You know, they do the same things as guys do. There was mention of a hockey game; they go to the hockey game together. There tend to

Status of Women committee  I do think it's primarily cultural. As so many gender differences are, though, it's hard to get to nature versus nurture dimensions definitively with every trade. But certainly, girls and young women want to have every skill that's required for a particular position before they w

Status of Women committee  Absolutely. It's been very heartening to see pilots for sponsorship. I was reading about one recently in a business report, in which a young woman is challenging and engaging other people within the company to take on a sponsorship, and then they choose to sponsor a woman and the

Status of Women committee  That's right. Certainly in our case, most of our online courses are taught by full-time faculty; it's part of their normal load. So you're looking at those two as an intersection. I'll just focus for a moment on part-time faculty. Anyone can see the statistics that across the co

Status of Women committee  I'm happy to say something about online delivery or technological delivery, in particular with regard to my own institution. We were the first university in Atlantic Canada to offer degrees via television, almost 30 years ago. That was predominantly to make higher education acces

Status of Women committee  I didn't have time to prepare, so I'm obviously finding some things to say. Some of it is cultural and more subtle. I think certainly in my experience the voice of authority is the bass voice. We hear that. I still find that many young women whom I mentor on my campus come to me

Status of Women committee  Thanks very much, and thanks for the opportunity to speak with the committee today on its important work. My appearance here today is serendipitous. I was scheduled to meet yesterday with Elizabeth May, Marilyn Gladu, and Sheila Malcolmson about their work on the all-party women