All News & Events
SCWIST co-presents evening with Catherine Roome, COO of BC Safety Authority - May 15, 2008
Along with Women in Engineering (Vancouver Region) and DAWEG, SCWIST is proud to present an evening with Catherine Roome, the recipient of the 2008 Influential Women in Business Award. Catherine will be giving an engaging presentation highlighting the success she has achieved with her career as an engineer and Chief Operating Officer. She will also lead an in-depth view of the career path she has pursued along with the influential people she has encountered at various turning point points in her career.
DATE: May 15th, 2008
TIME: 6 – 9pm
PLACE: YWCA, Welch room 1, 535 Hornby Street, Vancouver
RSVP: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
Cost: Free, but space is limited
Beverages, snacks, and sandwiches will be provided. There will be door prizes as well as an opportunity to network. More details can be found on our website (http://www.sfu.ca/~mlahaye/wie_vr.html).
SPEAKER BIO:
Catherine Roome started her career at the University of Victoria where she earned an engineering degree and participated in a co-op placement at the Neil Squire Society. There she developed cutting edge technology for individuals who require mobility assistance to gain access to computer applications via a mouthpiece. In the next stage in her career, she worked at BC Hydro as a Project Engineer and remained there for 15 years. In 2005, she joined the BC Safety Authority as Vice President of Engineering and currently acts as the Chief Operating Officer. In February 2008, Catherine was awarded the Influential Women in Business Award for her numerous accomplishments.
Women in Engineering (Vancouver Region)
.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
http://www.sfu.ca/~mlahaye/wie_vr.html
SCWIST Newsletter - April 2008
Read the latest edition of SCWIST News: SCWIST-News-2008-April.pdf
Biology most popular doctorate subject in Canada
Biology was the most popular field of study for doctoral students as of 2004/2005, according to Statistics Canada.
Of the 4,000 students who graduated from doctorate programs during that period, 21 per cent were in biological sciences. Engineering and humanities followed with more than 10 per cent, while nine per cent graduated from both psychology and education and eight per cent from social sciences.
Overall, about 34,000 students were enrolled in all years of doctorate studies. Enrolment has increased by about seven per cent a year since 2000. That increase should lead to a corresponding boost in the number of graduates, the agency said in a release Monday.
According to the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada, the growth is attributable to an increase in the number of faculty at Canadian schools and a boost in financial assistance and research grants from governments and universities.
About 59 per cent of students said they graduated without any debt. The proportion of students who graduated without any debt from their doctorate or undergraduate studies also improved, to 50 per cent from 46 per cent in the previous survey, conducted in 2003/2004.
Nearly two-thirds of graduates expected to earn a starting salary of more than $55,000, up from 60 per cent in the previous survey. Almost three quarters had firm plans for the future, Statistics Canada said.
Nevertheless, Canada lagged behind the rest of the developed world in producing PhD graduates. Canadians with doctorates make up only 0.4 per cent of the population, whereas in the United States, that ratio is 0.7 per cent.
Canada continued to be a destination of choice for foreign students, with nearly a quarter of Canadian doctorates earned by foreign or visa students. A majority of these students planned to stay in Canada, the agency said.
Women approached parity with men in doctorate studies, making up 46 per cent of graduates, up from 43 per cent. Still, some fields remained tilted toward one gender or the other, with men accounting for more than 80 per cent of engineering graduates while psychology was the other way around.
Symposium for Women Entering Ecology and Evolution Today (SWEEET) - May 11, 2008
SCWIST is proud to sponor SWEEET, a symposium intended to address issues that influence the advancement of women from postgraduate degrees into academic, government, and industry positions in Ecology and Evolution. The transition into permanent jobs is a critical step during career progression that involves many challenges and concerns that are particularly relevant to women.
Although a forum exists in the US to discuss the issues of advancement and retention (Women Evolving in the Biological Sciences, WEBS, funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation), no such forum exists in Canada. SWEEET feels that Canadian women face similar issues and could benefit from an opportunity to discuss these challenges with mentors and each other.
SWEEET 2008 will be a one day symposium on May 11, 2008 at the University of British Columbia, Green College, from 9am – 3pm.
Speakers from both academic and government backgrounds will address:
● Getting a job/postdoc in academia or government
● Navigating family and career responsibilities
● Negotiating
● Effective Grant Writing
● Networking
The symposium will take the format of short presentations by mentors in the field, followed by roundtable discussions.
For registration information please click here.
20% of university academics have used ‘steroids for scientists’
Professors, doctors, researchers, students using amphetamines to help them concentrate
One-fifth of the world’s professional scientists and university science students have used “cognition-enhancing” prescription drugs to help them concentrate, according to a survey by a top research journal.
The most common of these “steroids for scientists” is the amphetamine Ritalin, says the journal Nature.
While some officials at Canadian universities expressed surprise at the finding, others said the practice of using drugs to keep alert is well known.
A student diagnosed with attention deficit disorder, which is treated with Ritalin, can become very popular at exam time or when essays and lab work are due, they say.
Nature surveyed its global readership, most of them professors, doctors, corporate researchers and university science students.
The study found found:
– “The most popular is the campus ‘study aid’ Ritalin (methylphenidate), followed by the stimulant Provigil (modafinil) and then blood-pressure drugs called beta blockers, such as propranolol, that reduce anxiety. – “Four-fifths of respondents thought that healthy adults should be allowed to take such drugs if they want to, and almost 70 per cent said they would personally take them. ‘As a professional, it is my duty to use my resources to the greatest benefit of humanity. If ‘enhancers’ can contribute to this humane service, it is my duty to take them,’ wrote an unnamed reader from the United States. – “Although most people believed that children should be protected from such drugs, one-third admitted they would feel pressure to give them to their own children if other children were taking them.” – Of those using drugs, about half used them daily or weekly.About two-thirds of the survey’s respondents were American.
Canadian reaction to the survey varied widely. At the University of Western Ontario, officials said they had trouble last spring with drug dealers selling Ritalin to students. The other popular drug sold was Dexedrine, a related amphetamine.
Elsewhere, universities seemed surprised.
The University of Calgary says it sees more caffeine pills than prescription pills. David Turpin, president of the University of Victoria (and a career scientist) said he hadn’t heard of the practice.
But in 2005, the University of Michigan estimated that 10 per cent of U.S. college students use prescription drugs to help them study.
“Most students who use their friend’s stimulants do it to improve performance,” said Dr. Scott Teitelbaum, medical director of the Florida Recovery Center at the University of Florida. “It’s like athletes taking steroids—the idea that you can study better, harder, longer, as if you were hitting a ball farther.”
He said Ritalin “revs up” the central nervous system, creating feelings of alertness that are greater than those from caffeine, but less than cocaine.
At Western, Dr. Michael Rieder says it’s hard to estimate how many students use amphetamines. He teaches pediatrics and pharmacology.
“I think it varies from campus to campus and program to program,” he said.
“It’s a fairly recent phenomenon because we haven’t treated adults with ADHD for very long.”
These drugs can be dangerous, he said: Some people tolerate them well, but others can develop high blood pressure, tachycardia (rapid heartbeat) and even strokes.
“They’re prescription for a reason.”
But he said the college students are using the drugs the way they were designed, since they were developed to keep British soldiers awake during the Second World War. The U.S. military now uses stimulants for the crews of long-haul aircraft, he says.
Today, he said, there’s intense competition among grad students and post-doctoral fellows (researchers with new PhDs) especially in the United States.
“They’ll put four ‘post-docs’ on the same project, and only one will get to finish it. If you’re the one who finishes it, that’s the way to promotion and pay,” he said.
Some lab research also demands that students stay awake. For instance, medical and biology studies often require that a student watch nonstop how a cell develops over 24 hours.
Vancouver artist left legacy for both science and the arts
Anne Adams’ legacy lives on
Vancouver artist Anne Adams, who died a year ago of a rare brain disease, left a remarkable legacy to both science and the arts.
Clinical monitoring of the progression of the disease that caused her death – Frontotemporal dementia (FTD) – has provided scientists with hitherto unknown details of how the brain changes during this form of dementia and produces spurts of artistic activity.
Adams was a former UBC scientist who abandoned the microscope in 1986 for an artist’s palate and produced more than 1,000 paintings, including the seminal Unravelling Bolero.
She was one of the founders of Artists in Our Midst, which is now an annual event in Vancouver, where hundreds of local artists exhibit their work in various community centres. This began 16 years ago when Adams and her artist friend Pnina Granirer put their works on show at the Aberthau Community Centre in Point Grey and invited other artists to join them.
Adams and her family became aware there was something wrong with her in 2000, and by 2004 the disease had progressed until it took away her ability to speak properly or even add up simple numbers – a shock to her husband, Robert Adams, a UBC emeritus professor of mathematics.
“She was always strong in mathematics yet she reached the point where she was unable to add up simple numbers,” Robert said.
But while she lost those faculties because of the damage being done to one part of her brain, her brain was rewiring itself with another part taking over, allowing her artistic creativity to flourish, according to a study done by staff at the Memory and Aging Centre at the University of California, San Francisco.
“While the left-hand side of her brain was deteriorating the right hand side was growing,” said Robert.
During 2004, Anne painted some of her most vibrant and detailed works, including pictures of two houses in the Belgian town of Ghent and a house in Amsterdam.
Robert said that prior to Anne being diagnosed in 2002 with primary progressive aphasia, of which FTD is a variation, she had developed acoustic neuroma – a tumor attached to the acoustic nerve.
It proved benign, but it was constantly monitored by scans. When her FTD was diagnosed, doctors were then able to look at those early scans to compare changes in her brain, said Robert.
“The people looking at the acoustic neuroma weren’t dealing with dementia, but in 2004 when we went to the Memory and Aging Centre in San Francisco under Dr. Bruce Miller, the changes were apparent,” he said.
Her commitment to art began in 1986 when the couple’s 17-year-old son Alex was hurt in a car accident and was not expected to live.
“He was expected to die, but he made a miraculous recovery and was back to school again in no time, so she decided to concentrate on her art,” said Robert.
She would work from 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. in her studio and turned out a remarkable number of works covering many topics, from a set of 32 painting of buildings at UBC, to paintings of homes and stores on Vancouver’s west side, an ABC Book of Invertebrates, biological works of flowers and weeds and many whimsical pieces.
She never exhibited in a gallery but sold her paintings from exhibits in cafes around Vancouver or from her growing reputation as an artist, which led to her receiving numerous commissions, said Robert.
But it was her fascination with Maurice Ravel’s Bolero that caught the attention of the neurological team in San Francisco.
Ravel himself is thought to have had FTD and the team believed that both he and Anne were in the early stages of the disease when he composed Bolero – his most famous work – and she painted a stylized version of his repetitious and hypnotic notes as they build to a crescendo and collapse.
Anne’s work is done on two panels which measure three feet by two and is a bar-by-bar analysis of the Bolero, said Robert.
It’s painted in electrifying colours and contains hundreds of small rectangles, each representing a bar with angular lines and curves inside representing loudness and bass, and colour being used to signify pitch.
The paintings hung in their home and Robert would play a game with guests in which he would remove the title of the work and ask them to guess which piece of music it represented.
“One person got it right,” he said.
“It was only after Anne died that we realized that Ravel had died of the same thing,” he said.
The paper was published in the neurology journal Brain in December 2007.
As for Unravelling Bolero, it was sold to Miller and is now in San Francisco, said Robert.
Her paintings tend to be happy and colourful and many people who bought her work have told Robert that they still find joy in them.
“That’s quite a legacy,” he said.
The last painting she was able to finish was of the houses on the canal in Ghent.
“Her style of doing buildings had changed. It has a certain atmosphere about it which grabs you. She painted it from a photograph I took when we were there in 2002. It’s something I will never sell.”
BrownBag Summary - March 2008 - When is the right time to have children?
Groups of women discuss provocative topics at locations in academia and industry throughout BC. The March 2008 topic was: When is the right time to have children?
By: Michelle LaHaye
Despite the many changes that have happened allowing women to have children without being required to give up their careers, women still feel a strong sense that they will be perceived differently for having taken the time out to have a baby. And there are many questions surrounding the best time to do so to ensure that the disruption to their career is minimised. However, as brought up in the March BrownBag discussion at SFU, there doesn’t seem to be any answer to this question even from women who have had children.
The group did highlight some common themes including the reluctance of women to declare time-off for maternity leave for fear of being judged, that men don’t face the same concerns, and that having a partner with a less demanding job or less commitment makes things much easier. The women also felt that things have changed and that interviewing organisations and companies are sympathetic to women with children. The final part of their discussion centered around the magic number 35, the age after which the women would prefer not to start having children.
Women poised to dominate doctors’ offices
In the future, chances are you will have a female doctor—unless you need a hip replacement, a triple bypass or brain surgery.
Women are streaming into Canadian medical schools and are poised to dominate fields such as family medicine, psychiatry, and obstetrics/gynecology. But, they’re staying away from surgery in droves—avoiding fields where work-life balance sometimes means coming home to kiss the kids goodnight before being called to the hospital for an emergency.
The majority of first-year medical students in Canada are women, almost 60 per cent across the country and nearly 70 per cent at some universities in Quebec. Although women account for only a third of all physicians in Canada, more than half of doctors under 35 are female, according to a recent National Physician Survey.
With the average doctor set to hit retirement age in the next 15 years, the Canadian health-care system is on the cusp of a profound shift. Some areas of medicine will become female-dominated, but most surgical specialties—except obstetrics/gynecology—remain male bastions.
In neurosurgery, cardiac surgery and orthopedic surgery, the proportion of female doctors currently hovers below 10 per cent nationally, statistics from the Canadian Medical Association show.
Men also dramatically outnumber women among young doctors training in surgery: The proportion of female residents in neurosurgery is just 18 per cent, 15 per cent in orthopedic surgery, and 11 per cent in cardiac surgery and general surgery, according to the 2007 Canadian Medical Education Statistics.
Fields that have traditionally attracted women are more popular. Three-quarters of residents in obstetrics/gynecology and two-thirds of residents in family and pediatrics are women. Female residents are also in the majority in psychiatry and geriatric medicine.
Certain specialties may always appeal more to men, speculates Canadian Medical Association president Dr. Brian Day of Vancouver, citing his own field, orthopedic surgery.
“Orthopedics is somewhat of a carpentry type branch of medicine. And women don’t tend to become carpenters.”
But the reason high-pressure specialties are dominated by men is women want a family-friendly career, says Day. “We shouldn’t be afraid to discuss reality.”
Dr. Nancy Poirier is one of the exceptions, but admits she isn’t quite sure how she does it. Between her responsibilities as the head of the pediatric heart transplant program at Sainte-Justine hospital in Montreal and her work in adult cardiac surgery at the Montreal Heart Institute, she puts in 12-hour days and is on call two full weeks out of every month.
It doesn’t leave much time to spend with her husband and children—a three-year-old daughter and a five-year-old son.
Poirier, 42, is one of just a handful of female cardiac surgeons in Canada. She loves her job but she’s not surprised there are so few women like her.
“It’s hard,” she said in an interview. “I come home and put my children to bed.”
With the Canadian medical profession as a whole becoming feminized, the lack of female surgeons is yet another element threatening to put pressure on a health-care system already feeling the strain of a doctor shortage.
As it is, patients are waiting on average nearly half a year for orthopedic surgery and more than two months for brain surgery, according to a recent Fraser Institute report.
A lack of female role models is one of the reasons young women aren’t choosing surgery, says Dr. Carol Herbert, dean of the Schulich School of Medicine and Dentistry at the University of Western Ontario.
A conscious effort to recruit more women to her school’s surgery department has resulted in women making up three-quarters of medical graduates choosing to go on in surgery, but that’s not the norm nationally.
Certain surgical specialties—such as neurosurgery, cardiac surgery and orthopedics—are particularly difficult to reconcile with family life because they require a lot of emergency work, says Dr. Bryce Taylor, surgeon-in-chief at University Health Network in Toronto.
It doesn’t help that the training period typically takes at least five years after medical school for a surgeon, compared to just two years for a family doctor. Worse, the training period and its hefty share of on call duty coincides with peak child-bearing years.
“It’s a big commitment,” says Edmonton orthopedic surgeon Dr. Angela Scharfenberger.
At 40, Scharfenberger is only just now getting around to thinking about having children—a bit late, she admits.
According to a 2002 Canadian Medical Association survey, the average female doctor spends 41 hours on child care and 13 hours on household chores each week while male doctors spend just 15 hours on child care and eight hours per week on household tasks.
Given women’s second shift at home, it’s not surprising they spend less time on the job than men—48 hours a week, compared to the 56 hours a week male doctors work.
In order to accommodate the reality of women’s lives, “there’s going to have to be job sharing, flexible work, team work, group practices,” says Dr. Janet Dollin, the president of the Federation of Medical Women of Canada. “There really isn’t a lot of that going on among specialists,” she added—especially among surgeons.
There are limits to how flexible a surgeon’s work can be: There will always be a need to be on call for emergencies at night and on weekends, and surgeons can’t just walk away in the middle of an operation, even if they have a child with a raging fever at home.
But restrictions now limit the number of days doctors are on call duty, even for residents, and schedules can be rearranged to a certain extent.
In orthopedic surgery, operating room time is being designated during weekday, regular hours for emergency operations—which, in orthopedics, can usually be delayed a few hours and scheduled for the following day, says Dr. Peter O’Brien, president elect of the Canadian Orthopedic Society.
“We have made huge improvements in lifestyle issues,” says O’Brien—something men appreciate, too, he adds.
Ottawa neurosurgeon, Dr. Eve Tsai, 36, isn’t daunted by the prospect of fitting family into her busy life. She’s single but plans to marry and have children, despite her punishing schedule as the Ottawa Hospital’s go-to surgeon for instrumenting spines—10- to 12-hour days, and an average of a day a week on call.
She has it all figured out: she’ll get her parents to move in, just as her grandparents lived with her family and took care of her and her siblings while her parents worked.
“You don’t just sit and complain about it,” she said. “You find a solution.””
CanWest News Service
Celebrating Women’s Health: An evening with internationally known health activist Judy Norsigian
On Thursday April 24th health activist Judy Norsigian will be in Vancouver to talk about the global reach of the now classic book on women’s health Our Bodies, Ourselves. The Director of the Institute of Gender and Health (Canadian Institutes of Health Research), Dr. Joy Johnson, will open the evening with a discussion of the advances in women’s health research in Canada. SCWIST is proud to co-sponsor this free event open to anyone with an interest in women’s health. Guests can attend in person or over the internet via live webcast.
Norsigian is a co-founder and the Executive Director of Our Bodies Ourselves (OBOS), the organization that for almost 40 years has provided indispensable, scientific information on women’s health and sexuality. During her evening talk, Norsigian will describe the OBOS “Global Translations and Adaptations” program through images and stories. “Often a direct translation of Our Bodies, Ourselves is not culturally appropriate,” says Norsigian. “We seek to assist women’s groups around the world as they develop cultural adaptations of, or other publications inspired by, Our Bodies, Ourselves for outreach and advocacy in their community, country or region.”
Event Details
Date: April 24, 2008
Time: 6:30pm-10:00pm
Place: Paetzold Auditorium, Vancouver General Hospital
Cost: Free, but space is limited (live webcast also available)
Those who cannot attend in person can watch and ask questions via live webcast. For registration and details, visit http://www.whrn.ca
Speakers include:
• Judy Norsigian, Executive Director and co-founder of Our Bodies Ourselves
• Dr. Joy Johnson, Director of the Institute for Gender and Health, Canadian Institutes of Health Research
• Dr. Lorraine Greaves, Director of the BC Center of Excellence in Women’s Health
• Dr. Jerilynn Prior, Founder and Scientific Director of the Centre for Menstrual Cycle and Ovulation Research
Space is limited. To register please visit http://obos2008.eventbrite.com
If you wish to volunteer for the event – please contact SCWIST.
“How to be Happy”
A CBC documentary film titled “How to be Happy” along with a set of exercises to improve your happiness can be found online here.
The online Signature Strengths questionnaire was developed by Martin Seligman, a positive psychologist. Supposedly, exercising your Signature Strengths regularly contributes to your happiness.
Scientists identify gene that causes sudden death from heart disorder
Researchers studied Newfoundland families to develop test for lethal DNA glitch
A lethal gene killed Victoria Connolly’s mother, her brother Keith and sister Thelma, and is now cutting a swath through the younger generation.
Her nephew Tim died at 40, and her grandnephew Trevor dropped dead at 26. “He was getting ready to go to bed, collapsed and died,” says Connolly. “No warning, no idea there was anything wrong.”
But Connolly’s huge extended Newfoundland family now knows exactly what is wrong—a team at Memorial University announced Thursday the discovery of the gene responsible. They say it is one of the worst genetic demons ever encountered.
Victims can appear perfectly normal, and then drop dead.
“Suddenly they faint and they don’t get up,” says Dr. Terry-Lynn Young, who leads the team that has identified the gene after a 12-year quest.
The researchers have also devised a test to identify individuals who have the gene, which causes a disorder known as arrhythmogenic right ventricular cardiomyopathy Type 5, or ARVC5.
ARVC5 is believed to affect as many as one in 1,000 people and cause many of the 350,000 sudden cardiac deaths in North America each year.
Is it not known how many people carry the lethal gene the team has uncovered, but Young and her colleagues believe it may affect many unsuspecting individuals.
“There will be many more people of Newfoundland ancestry, and they’ll probably be people who have never seen Newfoundland, who have this same gene problem,” says geneticist Kathy Hodgkinson, co-author of a report on the gene in the April issue of the American Journal of Human Genetics.
Hodgkinson works closely with 15 large extended Newfoundland families that have long felt “cursed,” as Connolly describes it, because they’ve seen so many die young. The largest family includes 1,200 individuals dating back nine generations.
The clusters of premature sudden death in the families attracted gene-hunters from Germany and U.S. in the 1990s, who took DNA from hundreds of people but could not find the gene responsible.
Hodgkinson persuaded Young to pick up the quest in 2004. Her team, financed largely by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and Genome Canada, narrowed the search to a chunk of DNA on Chromosome 3. Then came the eye-glazing task of combing through the suspect DNA, comparing thousands of bits of gene sequence in individuals known to have the disorder with those who do not.
The culprit turns out to be a gene with a tiny but deadly mutation—a single typo in a string of 400 genetic letters. “It’s as if you had word the Mississippi and you changed one of those P’s to a T,” says Young.
It may be tiny, but she says the mutation is “insidious,” setting off a process that slowly replaces heart muscle with fibrous tissue and fatty deposits. Eventually the extra tissue throws the heart out of rhythm. Sometimes, fainting spells warn of trouble. But tragically, many victims just suddenly collapse, and then die.
“If you are male, the first symptom may be your last,” says Hodgkinson, noting how the gene is far more lethal in men. Without treatment half of males with the gene die before their 42nd birthday. Among women, five per cent die by age 40 and 15 per cent by 50.
Finding the gene is not a cure, the researchers stress, but it is seen as a big step forward as it has led to a highly accurate gene test, which is being welcomed by many of the affected families.
Victoria Connolly is one of the lucky ones. She has found out she did not inherit the gene and did not pass it on to her two daughters and three grandchildren.
“I must have cried for two days,” says Connolly, 54, of the relief she felt.
She hopes the discovery of the gene will lead to better understanding of the disorder and more effective treatment.
More than 100 high-risk individuals—some of them teenagers—from affected families have opted to have defibrillators (thin battery-operated devices) implanted near the collarbone. When the devices detect an irregular heartbeat or arrhythmia, an electrical shock restores a healthy heartbeat, bringing them back from death’s door.
The defibrillators are life-saving, but some individuals are so severely affected they have undergone heart transplants. One of Connolly’s nephews got a new heart, but died 11 years later at age 40.
Young, with irreverent Newfoundland humour, calls them “the walking dead.”
BrownBag Summary - February 2008 - Outcomes for internationally trained women
Groups of women discuss provocative topics at locations in academia and industry throughout BC. The February 2008 topic was: What are the prospects and outcomes of internationally trained women in Canada?
By: Michelle LaHaye
February’s topic is an important one not only for women but Canada as a country since the number of foreigners who come here and work every year is large. In 2006 there were just over 250 thousand new permanent residents and of these, nearly 140 000 were economic immigrants: skilled workers, business immigrants, provincial/territorial nominees, and live-in caregivers [1]. In addition there were another 120 000 temporary residents whose primary purpose was to work [1]. These foreign trained professionals fill a significant need in the Canadian economy, making up for a labour shortfall, particularly in health care, information technology, and skilled trades [2]. However, according to Statistics Canada,
Very recent immigrants who have been in Canada five years or less, that is, who landed between 2001 and 2006, had the most difficulty integrating into the labour market, even though they were more likely than the Canadian-born population to have a university education. [3]
One of the problems is that these “Many doctors, lawyers and other professionals struggle to get recognition for their foreign credentials and are forced into unskilled jobs to survive” [2]. And according to the Longitudinal Survey of Immigrants to Canada, the three most significant impediments to finding work were a lack of Canadian work experience, lack of recognition of foreign credentials and language barriers [3].
Employees at the BC Hydro BrownBag lunch discussion added several details in regards to the issues mentioned above. They said that:
It took more time to find a job than expected and
It was hard to get past experience and education recognized.
Moreover, once they had secured a position, they felt that the first few months were spent just proving their credentials.
In light of these comments, the discussion at BC Hydro made several suggestions that could be applied to any workplace where foreigners are starting work.
Provide explanations of the Canadian Tax, Benefits and Medical systems.
Share information on the background of the new hire to the manager and team members.
Make available resources on language specific to the job such as acronyms.
Institute an effective mentoring system where the mentor or buddy is available and can answer the person’s questions.
Make known what resources are available.
Provide information on career paths.
This is by no means an exhaustive list, but it does highlight some of the things that can be done to ease the transition for foreign trained women. Some of the other challenges faced are more subtle such as workplace cultural differences. For example, in North American high tech positions, there is a general acceptance that extra hours may be required for the job, but no where is this stated explicitly. Also, recognition or promotion is frequently up to the employee. In other cultures this may be the opposite, leading to a misunderstanding of the person’s happiness with their position.
The discussion at SFU examined the topic from the perspective of the reasoning behind a move to Canada, highlighting several factors that will influence the entire employment situation for these foreign trained women. Their reason for moving to Canada might not be economically motivated, but rather family related. Finding success in employment may come second to having or being united with family.
Another interesting point brought up by the group at SFU was that in computer science and engineering, there are proportionally more women in these areas internationally than there are in Canada. This means that the gender imbalance is less pronounced in grad school, for example.
Participants also felt that the expectation from Canadian employers was that a person have Canadian education or local work experience. Without either of these, it makes it very difficult to become established. And in particular, they said, Canadian employers do not give enough recognition to international education.
It is arguably far easier for a person with Canadian education or experience to find work, however, one can hope that as more foreign trained workers are integrated into the Canadian workforce, the more Canadians and immigrants will become knowledgeable about the credentials foreigners hold and will in turn be able to give the credit where it is due.
[1] Facts and Figures 2006: Immigration overview, Statistics Canada, http://www.cic.gc.ca/English/resources/statistics/facts2006/index.asp, June 2007
[2] Attracting skilled immigrants: The struggle to lure foreign trained workers, CBC News, http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/immigration/skilledimmigrants.html, Sept. 2004
[3] Canada’s immigrant labour market, The Daily, Statistics Canada, http://www.statcan.ca/Daily/English/070910/d070910a.htm, Sept. 2007
