VANCOUVER—After years of inaction by industry and the provincial government, the BC Tradeswomen Society is demanding a quota on women hires in all public projects.

Society president Lisa Langevin said diversity hiring policies — derided as “old fashioned” by industry representatives — have been successful in Newfoundland and Labrador in increasing the number of women in skilled trades.

“Women are discriminated against in every sector of the trades,” Langevin said.

Poonam Mistry said she and her colleagues are underemployed and hungry for opportunities.

She grew up playing with wires and fixing things in the house with her carpenter dad. However, Mistry is currently working as a scaffolding labourer because she hasn’t been able to find work as an electrician apprentice since she was laid off from her trades union in September.

“Starting in May, I just stopped sending out resumes because I was like, ‘What is the point? It’s just not getting anywhere,’” Mistry said. Among the many employers she reached out to were the City of Surrey and City of Vancouver.

Mistry pointed to a mass layoff of more than 150 workers at one of her last job sites.

“I don’t know one guy who’s out of work that we worked together with,” she said, while she and all of her female colleagues are struggling to get back in the field.

“The quota would definitely help bring more minorities in positions where they are not given those opportunities,” Mistry said.

Jordan Bateman, spokesperson for the Independent Contractors and Businesses Association (ICBA), which represents construction companies, said the idea of requiring companies to track the gender of their employees is “old-fashioned” and “isn’t relevant to any of the work that goes on.”

“No one knows what percentage of the construction workforce is female today,” he said. Therefore, it would be difficult to impose hiring requirements.

According to a 2017 report sponsored by the provincial and federal governments, the percentage of B.C. women in trades “presents a consistent picture of concern.” Women represent under 3 per cent of the workforce in roles such as plumbers, pipefitters, gas fitters, carpenters, electricians, welders and industrial and equipment mechanics. The percentage of women working in trades increased “slightly” to 4.4 per cent in 2015 from 3 per cent in 2001.

Langevin, an electrician for 16 years, called the low number of tradeswomen hired by public institutions “pathetic,” with school districts, hospitals and employers like the City of Vancouver and City of Surrey below the national average.

In some of these institutions’ trades departments, there are no female staff members, she said, even though the stable work hours would be suitable for tradeswomen who often balance their career with motherhood.

The industry is slow to adapt, Langevin said, and without implementing quotas or adding some sort of leverage, there won’t be any “real change” for women.

“We’ve been talking about this for a long time, and the City of Vancouver has a gender equity strategy and they have a diversity department so they’re implementing these things, but none of them seem to be impacting the actual numbers of women in trades,” she added.

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Langevin wants to see publicly funded infrastructure projects set hiring targets above the national average of women in skilled trades. Based on a separate report by Canadian Manufacturers & Exporters, the national average stood at 4.5 per cent last year. If the hiring quota is set at 6 or 7 per cent, Langevin said, “it’s still not an insane number.”

Projects starting up in Newfoundland and Labrador require women’s employment plans. “Diversity professionals” facilitate and monitor those commitments.

Companies use the services of the Office to Advance Women Apprentices (OAWA) to help them meet their targets and supply them with a list of eligible tradeswomen, explained Karen Walsh, the office’s executive director in Newfoundland.

Walsh said OAWA was created in 2009 by the government after they found tradeswomen were not being employed.

In the 1990s, only one per cent of the tradespeople at the Hibernia offshore oil-and-gas project in Newfoundland and Labrador were women, according to a report published this year by community agencies and labour organizations. In 2016, nine per cent of tradespeople in the Hebron project by ExxonMobil Canada Properties were women.

OAWA’s database now contains up to 1,750 tradeswomen. It identifies their specialization, area they live in and availability to travel for work, among other details. The office’s mandate is to help 60 women find work a year — and OAWA often doubles that.

“Employers are telling us that it sets a different tone for their organization. Their customer service has changed. The cleanliness left at their job sites have changed,” Walsh said.

If employers are not seeing female applicants, Walsh added, it is because they are not reviewing all of them.

Langevin said that when she proposed the idea of a quota to Shirley Bond, former minister of jobs, tourism and skills training under the Liberal government, she was told the government was “philosophically opposed to quotas.” Instead, they received funding for research looking at barriers women face in trades.

Melanie Mark, minister of advanced education, said she is currently not considering quotas. Still, she acknowledged she is aware of concerns that women continue to be under-represented.

“What I’m hearing is we don’t have enough of them. I hear that from industry; I hear that from across the sector,” Mark said.

Langevin acknowledged that setting quotas is not an ideal solution.

“I don’t think anyone ever wants to think that they want to get their job because of a quota,” she said.

“We don’t want a handout ... We want a level-playing field, and a quota on the onset looks like a handout, but once you wipe everything away you realize what it really does: It levels the playing field.”

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