(WPO9) Bridging the Gap: Empowered Immigrant Women in STEM and Overcoming Systemic Challenges

Canada's STEM sectors, despite reporting persistent labour shortages, exhibit a concerning pattern of under-serving immigrant women, specifically trained in STEM. Despite their significant potential, these women confront recruitment biases, misconceptions about their qualifications, and more. A study by TGC and Statistics Canada underscores this: immigrant women make up 52% of the STEM workforce but contend with high unemployment rates, wage disparities, and job-role mismatches. Addressing this requires a transformative approach: 1. Provide these women with resources such as online professional portfolios that emphasize their achievements and offer a comprehensive representation of their skills and abilities. 2. Building robust partnerships between Immigrant Serving Agencies (ISAs) and STEM employers to usher in bias-free recruitment. Employers and ISAs, along with funders play a pivotal role. By supporting ISA capacity in STEM-specific placement protocols and refining employer assessment to be more inclusive, we can begin narrowing the inequality gap. This session aims to: 1) Explore strategies to boost employment rates for immigrant women in STEM, eliminate wage disparities, and enhance job matching, 2) Discuss how stakeholders can support this shift, and 3) Identify the skills, knowledge, and resources essential to achieve these goals. As Canada progresses, it's not just about recognizing the skills and expertise of immigrant women—it's about reshaping policies and practices to create a more inclusive, robust STEM sector where every talent shines. Tags: Travail Et Professions

Organizer: Syeda Nayab Bukhari, Concordia University and TGC (TechGirls Canada)

Presentations

Saadia Muzaffar, TGC

Advancing Beyond Barriers: The Catalyst Program's Role in Enhancing Career Paths for Immigrant Women in STEM in Canada

This paper will share the findings of Catalyst a nine-week, online program that delivered innovative career advancement approaches to help immigrant women in STEM take charge of their career journeys in Canada. The Catalyst was built upon international labour market integration programs for skilled immigrants, including the evidence-based German pilot “Projekt Enter”. As STEM-trained immigrant women bring an average of seven years of professional experience when entering Canada, Catalyst focused on career advancement rather than initial job search. Catalyst also paid particular attention to addressing the following challenges identified by STEM-trained immigrant women: career gaps, potential underemployment, and perceived overqualification. While addressing these challenges, Catalyst used a strengths-based approach emphasizing the value immigrant women bring to Canada’s labour market. Catalyst was developed through an iterative process driven by evidence and Participatory Action Research. Program evaluation guided meaningful changes to delivery and content throughout each of the three participant cohorts. A mixed-methods approach captured both, the researcher and participant experiences on three key outcomes: participant engagement, participant confidence, and program experience.

Alla Konnikov, Concordia University of Edmonton

Beyond gender: the missing comparison of women to women in the Canadian engineering market.

Women have historically been underrepresented in the Canadian engineering market, experiencing a particularly slow entry, making engineering one of the most male-dominated fields. Vast attention from academia, industry, and policy has been devoted to studying the underrepresentation of women in engineering and looking for solutions to increase their presence (such as the 30 by 30 initiative by Engineers Canada). However, discussions surrounding women’s underrepresentation have largely overlooked the growing diversity among them, including an increasing number of first- and second-generation immigrants and racialized minorities. Indeed, Canada’s engineering field has evolved into one of the most diverse employment niches, with nearly 50% of practitioners being immigrants. If half of the engineers are immigrants, we must ask, ‘Which women’s experience?’ while studying women’s persisting underrepresentation and developing policies to address it. Women who are immigrants, racialized minorities, or both have the potential to face multiple simultaneous barriers on their paths to career attainment in engineering. Such barriers can be linked to their tokenized status as women in the male-dominated field, challenges in credential recognition as internationally-trained immigrants, and barriers of racialization associated with their ethnic or racial visibility. Using an intersectional lens, this paper studies how the heterogeneity among women in engineering is reflected in their occupational profiles, outcomes, and trajectories. Drawing on the 2021 Canadian Census data, this paper offers a missing but much-needed comparison of women to women in engineering, where women’s experiences and outcomes have been historically compared to men’s. Specifically, I test how immigration and visible minority statuses shape women engineers’ chances of entering the labour force, entering the field of study (or a related field), and securing advanced positions within the field. This intersectional examination is critical and timely, considering Canada’s active and expanding skill-oriented migration policy and the growing demographic diversity of the Canadian labour force. It is precisely in the context of this growing diversity that women’s experiences in the labour force need to be situated and understood, and policies and initiatives need to be developed and implemented. This paper contributes to advancing knowledge in the collective effort to recognize the intersectional complexity of women’s experiences and seeks nuanced solutions that can facilitate women’s occupational attainment in engineering and elsewhere.

Lyn Hoang, University of Manitoba

"It is easier to ask women to bend and accept toxic behaviour" - A cross-national examination of organizational responses to reports of incivility, hostility, and (sexual) harassment against women working in Engineering, Information and Communication Technology (EICT)

The trajectory of women’s education and career paths within Engineering, Information and Communication Technology (EICT) are subjected to leaks (e.g., “leaky pipeline”) at nearly every stage. As a result, women remain the most underrepresented within these Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) fields, and especially within leadership roles. This leaky pipeline continues to impact Canada, Germany, and Sweden. This is particularly noteworthy because these three countries represent different types of welfare states: liberal (Canada), conservative (Germany), and social-democratic (Sweden) – with vastly different approaches to, and policies for, supporting gender equity. Thus, a cross-national comparison of the factors that push or pull women out of EICT is needed. Previous research into women’s attrition from EICT has broadly identified hostile work environments as contributing to women exiting these fields. Yet, it is unclear how certain organizational responses to formal and informal reports of workplace incivility, hostility, and/or (sexual) harassment against women support or hinder efforts to improve gender representation within EICT. To address this gap, we perform a mixed-methods analysis of women’s experiences working in EICT jobs in Canada, Germany, and Sweden. The results of statistical analysis of survey data reveal that while many women have experienced various negative workplace incidents against them, only some women report these incidents - and those who do report, tend to not to be satisfied with their experience(s) of reporting. Dissatisfaction worsens for individuals with additional marginalized identities. Reporting and underreporting also varies by country with Canadian survey respondents more likely to report incidents compared to German or Swedish survey respondents. Findings from the qualitative content analysis of open-ended survey responses, and in-depth interviews with women working in EICT in all three countries reveal patterns of inaction, trivialization, and dismissing of informal and formal reports by organizational supervisors and leaders. Moreover, survey respondents and interview participants report experiencing pressures from management, leadership, or administration to accept or ignore these negative workplace incidents. This contributes to participants and respondents becoming more cynical of their organization’s commitments to supporting them and gender equity. Such experiences contribute to women’s higher turnover intention within EICT. Interestingly, some women in our study who reported such negative experiences indicate that they do not intend to change jobs or leave their careers in EICT in the next two years. Drawing on the framework of Manufacturing Consent and the concept of rational co-optation developed by Michael Burawoy, we argue that such organizational responses (inaction, trivialization, and dismissing) to formal and informal reports of workplace incivility, hostility, and/or (sexual harassment) serve to co-opt women into these largely patriarchal (and in some cases misogynistic) organizations. The women who remain in such organizations become keenly aware through first-hand experience, or secondarily through the experiences of other women or marginalized individuals, that they must either “accept” the unsupportive and misogynistic culture of their EICT workplace or leave. Many women may choose to leave in search of more favourable workplaces that offer gender representation after they lose confidence that these organizations will support them and improve gender equity more broadly. Others may remain in such jobs and careers but no longer report negative incidents against them. Thus, we argue that the inaction and inadequate action to formal and informal reports serves to reinforce gender inequality and maintain the skewed gender ratio within EICT at all stages.

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Non-presenting authors: Jennifer Dengate, University of Manitoba; Tracey Peter, University of Manitoba; Annemieke Farenhorst, University of Manitoba; Minna Salminen, Uppsala University; Andrea Wolffram, RWTH Aachen University