A commentary by a writer on Vancouver Island and in Toronto; she was a management consultant at McKinsey and Company and has advised not-for-profit organizations.
As Canada celebrate International Women’s Day today, I am proud of the business community’s progress fostering female leaders — but daunted by the road ahead
When I graduated from Queen’s University 30 years ago, I could never have imagined a world with year-long maternity leaves, work-from-home opportunities and full-day kindergarten.
In my first month as a business analyst, I thought I would let my individuality shine. Instead, I was advised to wear higher heels, darker colours and only skirts above the knee.
I thought I would become a trusted adviser. Instead, I learned which clients to avoid in the evenings.
I thought I would be part of a client team. Instead, I had to walk down two flights to find a women’s bathroom at one client’s site and wait outside a strip joint for my colleagues at another.
Canadian business is now welcoming my eldest daughter, Sophia, with respect, support and mentorship. But vast challenges to gender parity remain.
Although women now represent half of the labour force, fewer than five per cent of Canadian companies have a woman CEO and our gender wage gap remains one of the highest of countries in Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development
Most worrying is that despite Canada’s national efforts to attract women to STEM careers, more women are not pursuing computer science, mathematics and engineering.
Thirty years after the massacre of 13 female engineering students at École Polytechnique in Montréal, fewer than a quarter of Canada’s STEM workers and only 14 per cent of Canadian professional engineers are women.
These gaps cannot be fixed by businesses alone, because women are missing opportunities while they are still children.
My youngest daughter, Felicity, raised this issue at her British Columbia school when she observed she was only girl in two classes of Grade 9 computer coding. She then researched to discover that only 20 per cent of first-year university engineering and physics students are female.
No amount of affirmative action or corporate programming can solve a numbers problem like this one. We need to better understand why women and girls are dropping analytics at such young ages.
Data suggests that girls lack mathematical confidence, not talent. The most recent Ontario Education Quality and Accountability Office study showed almost no difference in gender performance of students in math.
But as early as Grade 3, considerably fewer girls report they “like” math than boys. By Grade 6, only 40 per cent of girls “like” math compared with almost 60 per cent of boys.
Canada needs to equalize its educational opportunities to develop its best possible pool of talent. We need to bolster math and science curricula, develop recreational math and science programs for girls and attract more science and math professionals to teaching.
We also need to better understand and address the societal stereotypes that continue to drive girls away from STEM.
Without finding ways to engage women and girls in analytic pursuits, Canada will miss out on new ventures, technology and innovation.
We will not find our country’s best manufacturing leaders, financial officers and board members. And we will not be able to avoid affirmative action programs that place people into positions where they might lack required experience.
Without a renewed focus on girls’ education, Sophia and Felicity will not be writing of their pride in Canada’s business community in another generation.
