Resources
Organizations
Randstad
This organization works towards transforming the workplace through creation initiatives, community building, and a podcast series. Their podcast series is called ‘women who innovate.’ I encourage all of you to listen to these podcasts as they will inspire you and motivate you to achieve your full potential and truly transform the workplace.
Topics in ‘Women who Innovate’
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Shattering the glass ceiling in engineering
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Examining biases in scientific spaces
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Navigating identity
Randstad provides career resources to women, including tips for job searching during the pandemic, stretches to do while working from home, and lists of jobs that are trending during the pandemic. During covid-19, women have suffered from more job losses than men. According to Statistics Canada, female employment decreased by 17% and male employment decreased by 14.5%. Women between 15-24 are suffering the most economically, as employment dropped by 38% for this group. The reason being is because the service sector is predominantly held by females. This includes jobs in restaurants, retail, and childcare.
Randstad addresses many challenges that women face in the workplace. Women are severely under-represented in senior management positions. Moreover, Randstad conducted surveys amongst women in order to understand the factors that contribute to the under-representation of women at the board level. It is important to understand what the factors are in order to truly eliminate the under-representation of women in senior management/board level positions. According to their findings, 34% of women said that they don’t have a lot of executive female role-models in leadership positions. 62% of women said that gender discrimination is an obstacle to female leadership. This shows that in order to create more female leaders, it is important to hire and promote more women in leadership positions. This will create powerful female mentors for years to come and will encourage young girls to take on these roles in their future careers.
Young Women's Christian Association
The YWCA is in the midst of taking on the project, Synergy: Workforce Development for Women to Succeed. This is a collaborative project between YWCA and Future Skills Centre. Future Skills Centre works towards helping Canadians acquire essential skills to thrive in the ever-changing workforce. This project conveys the challenges that vulnerable women in Canada experience when entering the workforce. The goal of this project is to provide powerful programming in order to implement promising practices for women in the workforce. It will also include robust online training in order to help vulnerable women financially succeed.
National Association of Women and the Law
National Association of Women and the Law is a non-profit organization that promotes women’s rights through legal education, research, and law reform advocacy. This organization does independent and collaborative work in order to strive for feminist law reform in Canada. Despite the fact that NAWL was defunded in 2006, they still continued to advocate for women. Although transferring feminist law reform skills no longer occurred in the ten years, they found other ways to make it work, such as developing online resources to aid women law students and aspiring activists. NAWL was refunded in 2017 and continues to do amazing work for women in the legal sector.
Canadian Government
The government of Canada has invested nearly $5 billion in a new Women Entrepreneurship Strategy. The purpose of WES is to advance the economic empowerment of women in Canada. In Canada, only 16% of small and medium businesses are run by women. Advancing gender equality benefits both men and women. Increasing women’s active participation in the economy can potentially lead to $150 billion in GDP. WES provides many resources and helps women thrive in their businesses through an increased access to financing, talents, expertise, and networking.
Resources that WES provides:
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Women entrepreneurship fund
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Ecosystem fund
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Entrepreneurship knowledge hub
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Expert panel
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Business app
Legal Advice for Women Who Experience Workplace Assault
According to Statistics Canada, 19% of women and 13% of men had reported experiencing workplace assault in 2016. If you ever experience workplace assault, Steps to Justice, an organization that provides legal advice, has come up with a 5-step process on how to go about this situation.
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Write down or type out what happened. Include the date, time, who was involved, who was the witness, what was said/done, injuries, and steps you may have taken to solve the problem. Email this document to yourself so that you have a copy.
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Seek out legal advice. For a free consultation from a paralegal or lawyer, reach out to the Law Society Referral Service.
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Ask your employer about health and safety rights. They are not allowed to deny you information on any of these subjects.
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Find out if you can complain to the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario.
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Find out about making a complaint to the Ministry of Labour. You can file a complaint to the Ministry of Labour if your employer isn’t following the harassment policies and laws of the company.
The investigator of the case can look into whether your employer followed the law or not. If they have not, then the investigator has the right to order the employer to:
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Create workplace harassment policy.
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Post the company’s current policy.
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Change or revise the policy.
Extra Resources
References
Balakrishnan, Anita. “Ontario's Law Firms Were Mostly Led by Men Again in 2018.” Law Times, Law Times, 16 May 2019, www.lawtimesnews.com/resources/practice-management/ontarios-law-firms-were-mostly-led-by-men-again-in-2018/263551.
Canada, Innovation. “Women Entrepreneurship Strategy.” Home, 16 May 2020, www.ic.gc.ca/eic/site/107.nsf/eng/home.
“Empowering Women: Women Transforming The Workplace: Randstad Canada.” Empowering Women | Women Transforming The Workplace | Randstad Canada, www.randstad.ca/women/women-transforming-the-workplace/#team.
“Our Current Work.” National Association of Women and the Law, nawl.ca/our-work/.
Rosen, Brittany. “Statistics Canada: Women Facing Higher Rate of Unemployment Compared to Men.” Global News, Global News, 19 May 2020, globalnews.ca/news/6950176/statistics-canada-women-unemployment-coronavirus/.
“Steps to Justice.” Steps to Justice, 2018, stepstojustice.ca/steps/employment-and-work/5-if-you-had-leave-your-job-because-harassment-get-legal-advice.
“Synergy: Workforce Development for Vulnerable Women to Succeed.” YWCA, ywcacanada.ca/news/synergy-workforce-development-for-vulnerable-women-to-succeed/.