(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)

Presentation

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