Women & Education in Canada: How Far We Have Come. How Far We Have to Go.

The Empire Club Presents

Ms. Deryn Lavell, Head of Bishop Strachan School

With

Women & Education in Canada: How Far We Have Come. How Far We Have to Go.

September 29, 2016

Welcome Address by Paul Fogolin, Vice President of the Ontario Retirement Communities Association and President of the Empire Club of Canada

Hello, once again, ladies and gentlemen. I hope you all enjoyed your lunch. It was quite fantastic. Good afternoon.

We are live from the Delta in downtown Toronto. Welcome, to the 113th season of the Empire Club of Canada. For those of you who are just joining us through either our webcast or our podcast or on Rogers TV, welcome, to the meeting.

Before our distinguished speaker is introduced, it gives me great pleasure to introduce our Head Table Guests. Traditionally, I would ask that, as I call them to rise, we hold our applause, but for any of you who have come to these lunches, you know that nobody listens to that, so clap as much as you would like as I call these names.

Head Table

Distinguished Guest Speaker:

Ms. Deryn Lavell, Head of School, The Bishop Strachan School

Guests:

Mr. Brendan Caldwell, Director, Caldwell Securities Ltd. Ms. Riley Caldwell, Student

Ms. Vivien Clubb, Head of Marketing and Communications, IBK Capital Corp.; Bishop Strachan Alumna

Ms. Jody Larose, Executive Director, Tourism Partnership of Niagara; Director, Empire Club of Canada

Ms. Cindy Tripp, Chair, Bishop Strachan Board of Directors

Mr. William White, Chairman, IBK Capital Corp.; Director, Empire Club of Canada

Once again, my name is Paul Fogolin. For my day job, I am the Vice President of the Ontario Retirement Communities Association and the President of the Empire Club of Canada for this season. Ladies and gentlemen, your Head Table guests.

This is part of our 150th anniversary of Canada series, or the sesquicentennial. Do not try to say that five times fast. As part of that series, we always start off our lunches by lighting some candles on a cake and blowing them out. I would like to call up Deryn and Vivien to join me for this ceremony.

This season at the Empire Club, in celebration of the sesquicentennial, we are hosting a series of speakers to address topics of significance not only to the history of this great country, but also to its future.

Education in Canada and, more specifically, the im portance of women’s education, is an ideal topic for this series. At this Club, on October 3rd, 1935, the Director of Education from Kent England, Mr. E. Salter Davies, delivered a speech entitled “Education and the Future of Civilization.” Mr. Davies, who was visiting Canada to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Overseas Education League, had this to say about how best to define education: “Education is the deliberate human effort, which is directed upon the individual with the twofold objective of enabling them to be at home in their environment, to understand the world to which they are placed, and to enable them to do something to bring their environment into harmony with one’s own conscious purpose.” What an accurate and eloquent definition of ‘education’, the kind of inspirational description that should make any educator proud of what they do.

The problem is that during Mr. Salter’s time, the central focus of education was, not exclusively, but primarily men. Thankfully, we have come a long way. In fact, recent statistics indicate that young women are frequently outperforming their male counterparts in the classroom. A 2006 census indicated that for the first time in Canadian history, there are actually more female than male university students, with women making up 60% of all graduates. While there is still much progress to be made, women’s education, in Canada, is the strongest it has ever been and has contributed to the elevation of women to some of the highest positions of leadership in business and government.

Today, we have the pleasure of having with us an educator who is truly passionate about bringing out the best in young women and helping to shape the female leaders of tomorrow. Deryn Lavell is a highly respected educational leader with over 30 years of experience in Canada and abroad. With a Master of Educational Administration and a Bachelor of Education from the University of Victoria, Ms. Lavell’s career has taken her from the classrooms of Alert Bay, Prince Rupert and Victoria, B.C., to increasingly senior roles in the United Arab Emirates and Canada.

Currently, Ms. Lavell is the Head of School at the Bishop Strachan School—soon also to celebrate its 150th anniversary, making it this country’s oldest boarding school and day school for girls. She is a powerful advocate for equality and empowering girls with the confidence they need to thrive in an increasingly complex world, a philosophy that has distinguished her leadership at BSS.

Ladies and gentlemen, please, join me in giving a warm welcome to our guest of honour, Ms. Deryn Lavell. And, first, a short video will play before Deryn addresses the audience.

[VIDEO.]

Deryn Lavell

I always think that the girls speak much better than I ever could. I hope you enjoyed that video and got a little taste of who we are at BSS.

Thank you, Paul, for that very kind introduction. Good afternoon, everyone. I am really so pleased to see so many friends and so many colleagues and, of course, students here today. I would also like thank Douglas Derry for suggesting this wonderful opportunity.

It is a real honour to be speaking at the Empire Club, an organization that stood at the centre of important Canadian conversations since 1903. In that time, you have welcomed a startling collection of some 3,500 speakers in whose footsteps I now humbly stand. One of those speakers, the Honourable Iva Campbell Fallis, in 1939, began her address by saying, “I count it a great honour that I, a mere woman, should be asked to speak in these sacred precincts of the male, or perhaps, the great majority of you are becoming more or less reconciled to the fact that no place is sacred from our invasion anymore.” I had a laugh when I read that—just how brazen it was.

Because of its records of speakers and the archives it has kept, the Empire Club offers us a unique insight into the evolution of women’s roles in Canadian society. I am sure, at the time, it was quite extraordinary, not to mention progressive, to have a female speaker address that audience. It was an era when women’s places were taken for granted to mean the home, or, as my grandfather liked to call it, ‘the good old days’. My, how things have changed and how they have not. I was watching the Tonight Show with Seth Meyers after the democratic convention, and he said half-jokingly, “Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump have clinched the nomination of their respective parties, which means we could be looking at our first female president or our last president.” I am not going to dwell on that terrifying sideshow that is going on with our friends to the south. However, the narrative swirling around this presidential contest, rife with sexism, racism and dumbism, reminds us, rather chillingly, that even in one of the most progressive and enlightened societies on earth, there is a sizeable portion of the population that would rather have an unstable demagogue running things than a woman.

Gender is playing a big role here, not just because of Trump’s obvious limitations, but—and, perhaps, even more dangerously—because of the unconscious bias against female leaders that is going to be tested in the U.S. this November. Whether you like Hillary or not, consider yourself a feminist or not or are male or female, there is an extensive body of research that shows that women who seek leadership positions often encounter resistance if they violate gender norms by acting in what are thought to be masculine ways, like being competitive, assertive and self-promotional.

According to Terri Vescio, a psychology professor at Penn State who studies gender bias, the more female politicians are seen as striving for power, the less they are trusted and the more moral outrage gets directed at them. If you are perceived as competent, you are not perceived as warm, but, if you are liked and trusted, you are not perceived as competent. In other words, you are damned if you do, and you are damned if you do not.

There is a lot at stake right now. If gender bias topples Mrs. Clinton’s chances, we may all pay a punishing price. That is the amazing and frustrating story of our age. Women have gone from being nonexistent in public and professional life to being reluctantly accepted, to outnumbering their male counterparts at all levels of education, to working alongside them, to everyone feeling self-congratulatory about having a female actually run things.

Today, those shining examples are trotted out over dinner parties and dinner conversations to demonstrate that everything is fair and fine out there. If you dare to point out things, like unconscious gender bias, you will quickly be accused of man bashing by men and women alike. I, as the proud Head of Canada’s oldest day and boarding school for girls, see it as my responsibility to prepare our students for the real world. Yes, that means they will need the hard skills, the knowledge, the critical thinking, creativity and innovation mindset that are all required in today’s economy, but they are going to need much more than that. We cannot afford to buy into the myth that all will be fair and equal for them as they strive for leadership in their chosen fields. They are going to need a firm handle on what to expect and the tools, not only to deal with it, but to change it.

At the same time, I must take care not to extinguish their enthusiasm and ambition. It is a tricky line to walk. The future of our country, well, the planet, actually, relies on women, like me, like them, not giving up or giving in. That might sound a bit breathtaking, but bear with me. If you are inclined to wonder why we still need a girls’ school like BSS and girls’ schools in Toronto that my colleagues all run, I am here to tell you.

We are on the verge of celebrating a big birthday, and we are all really excited about it. BSS is turning 150 years old next year—and Canada, too, by the way, as you know. By a country’s term, 150 years is still pretty young. Canada is youthful; it is growing; it possesses a sense of future and possibility. For a school to be turning 150 and still be thriving, relevant and young at heart, that is a real accomplishment. To be a girls’ school, nudges that accomplishment a few more notches, particularly, when you think about the world in which BSS was born, a world that did not place much priority on girls’ education.

At that time, their options were limited primarily to convent schools run by the Roman Catholic Church or a few private schools that were too expensive for most. The Anglican Church wanted to create a quality school that would be affordable and would offer an alternative to the Catholic teachings. In 1867, the Bishop Strachan School, named for the first Anglican Bishop of Toronto, was opened.

The first 31 students were to be prepared—and here I quote from our archives: “For the serious duties of life as members or heads of families.” Although the school offered sufficient preparation for those who wished to pursue university studies, there actually were not too many places to go. King’s College, the precursor to the University of Toronto, began welcoming men in 1843, but its doors remained shut to females until a provision was passed by the Ontario legislature in 1884 to admit women.

The first female 11 students who gamely joined the gentlemen scholars were denied access to reading rooms, residences, the library, and even the washroom, as there were none designated for women on campus; however, the spark had been ignited, and things were about to change, albeit more of a simmer than a conflagration.

You have to remember, too, that, at the time of Confederation and the founding of BSS, there were three basic conditions for becoming a voter: One, you had to be male; two, you had to be 21 or older; and, three, you had to be a British subject. Women, Aboriginals and non-British immigrants were out of luck. Women could be required to pay taxes, but were not entitled to vote until just 100 years ago, and nobody was throwing them a tea party.

Having the vote was one thing. Having the right to enter public life was quite another. From Senator Fallis’ speech to this club in 1935, she cited an editorial that said, “Now that women have been granted the franchise, the House of Commons might as well prepare to receive them as members, but, fortunately, that is a problem the Senate will never have to face.” Canadian women were not officially persons, according to the British North America Act, and, therefore, they were not eligible for a Senate seat.

That changed thanks to the dogged determination of a small group of women, interestingly, led by BSS alumnae and the first female magistrate of Canada, Emily Murphy, who fought for and eventually won a seminal change in policy.

Finally, women were declared to be persons, and Senator Fallis, who started her career as a teacher, was the second female to receive such an appointment, or, as she described it, she became the second problem faced by the Senate.

Over the years, BSS has played a significant role in shaping the path for women in Canada. With alumnae like Emily Murphy, all the way back in 1885, all the way to distinguished leaders like Jalynn Bennett, one of the most influential business leaders in Canada, or Laryssa Patten, aerospace engineer, we have been behind the scenes as the incubator of empowerment, working with girls at the most important developmental stages to ensure they feel strong and capable and ready to take on the challenges ahead.

Sometimes it takes a big anniversary like this to go back and reflect on our history, to read the stories of our past. It is instructive when I talk to the girls at BSS today— girls who really only know this world in which everything seems pretty fantastic. They have such a positive outlook on their prospects, and they do not feel there is anything real or imagined that can hold them back simply because they are girls. “Time to move on, Ms. Lavell; you are living in the past.” They say that a lot. It is tempting to believe that. I want to believe that. After all, are we not among the most open, democratic and values-driven nations in the world?

Our prime minister brought parity to cabinet. There are 22 female CEOs among Fortune 500 companies, including IBM and HP; 16 of 94 colleges and universities in Canada are being run by female presidents. Hillary Clinton’s contention to become president of the United States paints a pretty rosy picture, does it not? Well, when my colleagues and I at BSS think about what our girls need to be successful in their lives, it would be irresponsible of us to dwell only on that half of the picture. We have to give the whole picture and prepare them for what really lies ahead: That is not all roses.

Allow me to refer to another of the Empire Club’s distinguished speakers, the Honourable Ellen Fairclough, Canada’s first female member of cabinet. In 1957, she observed that despite the large number of women shareholders, the names of relatively few women appear in the list of directors of Canadian companies: “It is my conviction that this situation will change in the next ten years […] although legislation has been adopted in most of Canada, which gives equal pay for equal work to men and women, there has yet not been general acceptance of the principle of equal opportunity.” It has been a little more than her predicted ten years, and there are still too few female directors, and the pay equity gap in Canada remains stubbornly out of whack. That women continue to face challenges based on stereotyping, unconscious biases and a lack of innovation in public policy to champion families of two working parents is true and puzzling.

Most of us can agree that equal opportunity and equal pay are sacrosanct in a democratic society, but we just have to do better at achieving a record that we can, as Canadians, be proud of when it comes to gender. Equality is not the same thing as sameness. Maybe this is where we have been running into difficulties. I might be equally qualified, but I bring different skills to the table. This is a concept that has been wildly manipulated to gloss over the underlying sexism with what, on the surface, appears to be a reasonable point of view. To wit, former Australian Prime Minister, Tony Abbott in 2010 opined, “While I would think men and women are equal, they are also different, and I think it is inevitable—and I don’t think it is a bad thing at all—that we always have, say, more women doing things like physiotherapy and an enormous number of women simply doing housework.” That is not what I mean by ‘different’. There are ways in which women’s conditioning, if not our actual brain wiring, lead us to different strengths. The question is what does that mean in terms of our value?

Whether you believe that gender-assigned roles emanated from cave person days or, as a recent study suggests, things started to tilt in favour of men in charge with the advent of agriculture, the skills commonly assigned to males have been, throughout history, more highly prized, things like hunting, defending the community from danger, providing food and shelter, amassing wealth and power. These are the things that people praised. Killing a raging boar in its tracks was deemed a lot more admirable than whipping up a boar souffle, never mind that you did not have a stove or even a whisk. Nevertheless, strength, bravery, feats of daring and risk and all the attendant character and physical strengths they required were embedded in human culture as powerful and, therefore, good. Raging boars are not so much of a problem anymore. We need a new ranking system.

We are in the era of innovation. Invention leads to the wheel. Innovation leads to sticking wheels on a suitcase. It is a mindset that is constantly seeking fresh perspectives on the status quo. President Obama observed that the country that goes all in on innovation will own the global economy. Canada must transition to a knowledge-based economy if we are to ensure sustainable growth and standards of living in the future. That means our reliance on raw materials and manufacturing needs to shift. We must differentiate ourselves in the global marketplace. Innovation relies on educated people imagining what is not there yet. We need particular strength in the STEM fields, including research and development. Across all knowledge sectors, the demand for skilled workers is going to continue to rise. The World Economic Forum projects that by the year 2030, the U.S. and Europe will likely need an additional 70 million workers to sustain economic growth.

It is unlikely that Canada can rely solely on immigration in that competitive environment, to fill its own gaps, particularly, in the light of a declining birth rate and an aging population. It so happens that women may be, in fact, particularly well equipped to lead in the area of innovation. Study after study has concluded that women can and, in fact, are better leaders in organizations that rely on teamwork and collaboration for productivity. In one study of 82 teams in 29 organizations that were identified as innovation based, it was found that as coordination requirements increase, teams with female leaders reported greater team cohesion, more cooperative learning, and more inclusive communication than those led by men. This is particularly valuable when you think of members of teams working from different locations and even countries. The stereotype that women are not likely to perform as well in function al areas traditionally believed to be male oriented, such as engineering, IT, legal and R&D were also resoundingly refuted by a broad five-year study, which demonstrated that women received not only solid, but higher effectiveness ratings than males in these functional areas.

In a Center for Talent Innovation study concluded that the most successful companies deploy two kinds of diversity: Inherent, meaning more women and people of colour, and acquired, meaning leaders behave inclusively to, as they call it, foster the speak-up culture that unlocks a broad spectrum of perspectives and tool kits. Their study showed that companies with these attributes out-innovate and outperform their competitors.

There is no evidence to support the notion that female leadership traits and attributes are less effective in today’s world. In fact, the growing body of evidence suggests the opposite is true. What is getting in the way? Pattie Sellers, editor-at-large for Fortune magazine, believes that parity will not happen in our lifetime because the band of acceptable female behaviours is so narrow as to render it impossible for women to, a she puts it, lead authentically. Selena Rezvani, author of The Next Generation of Women Leaders, states that our social conditioning has entrenched the nuanced barriers that women face, not only by men, but from women, too. It is a complex problem. I think we need to start by ranking so-called female leadership traits right up there with the so-called male ratings and male traits because we can plainly see that they are equally valuable and increasingly important in the innovation era.

We must change our lenses and recalibrate our perception so that women are allowed to be cranky and ambitious without that translating into untrustworthy and other words, which I am not going to use. I will leave that to Mr. Trump. I am not as pessimistic as Pattie Sellers. I do believe parity is within reach. I also believe we have a lot of work to do. I need for the girls at BSS to be aware of that reality and to be ready so, so ready to take it on. By championing women in leadership roles, I am not advocating displacing men. It is not a zero-sum game. It is also not a balancing act or an exercise in fairness. It is simply the fact of fitness. All those millennia of conditioning, brain wiring, figuring out how to make boar meat taste good have led us to this place. Now, there is a real opportunity to own the future, if Canada prizes and celebrates its immense female talent pool to strengthen our economy and our country.

In education terms, I made it to CEO. I feel blessed and so proud to be the leader of one of the finest academic institutions in the world. The fact that I run a girls’ school is even more perfect for me because, along with my colleagues, I get to be the one to make sure that the girls in our community hear the words, “You can do anything.” Sometimes that is all a girl needs, but sometimes she also needs to be prepared with a realistic view of the world and the character traits she needs to thrive in it, things like resilience, patience and the value of failing, the rewards of risk, win or lose, empathy, curiosity and, above all, self-confidence. Our girls have the right abilities at the right time for them to finally realize Senator Fallis’s desire back in 1935, to have our vocation in life determined largely by our own ability and inclination, rather than be determined for us solely by custom and environment.

Far from becoming anachronistic, the role of BSS is more crucial, more relevant, more exciting and more challenging now than ever before in its 150-year history. We are educating for this economy for the potential of what Canada and the world can look like in the future, not just to lead innovation for the sake of amassing wealth, but for the sake of saving the planet, for having a more peaceful and less violent world, for improving our better natures and deepening our sense of connection to one another.

We give our girls a world to grow up in that is full of opportunity so that they can rise to their fullest potential. That is going to benefit all of us. Thank you.

Note of Appreciation, by Mr. Brendan Caldwell, Director, Caldwell Securities Ltd.

They could not find a cave person, so they have got to use the old boy to do this. I have to say that Deryn Lavell has been one of my great heroes. I was blessed with three daughters, who were kind enough to come here today, and we were looking around for a school. I had one younger brother growing up, and I had gone to an all-boys school from the time I was eight. God thought it would be funny to give me three girls. I love you all dearly. I really, deeply, profoundly do. I just do not understand you. As my wife, Sandra, and I were looking for the right place to go, it was really Sandra that really settled on a school that was academically focused, was focused not just on that, though, but on the emotional, spiritual, physical welleing of the young women in its care. Deryn Lavell, as much as anyone in recent years, helped create that school and create an environment where my daughters and many hundreds of other young women like them can grow up to learn that they can, in fact, do anything, and they can become the people that their creator intended them to be.

For your words, today, Deryn, and for years of blessing, help and support to our family, I thank you.

Concluding Remarks, by Paul Fogolin

A sincere thank you to our two generous sponsors for this afternoon’s lunch, our sesquicentennial sponsor, IBK Capital, and our event sponsor, Caldwell Securities. Without sponsors, we simply could not hold lunches such as this, so thank you very much.

I would also like to thank the National Post, who is our print media sponsor and Rogers TV, who is our local broadcaster. We would also like to thank mediaevents. ca, Canada’s online event space, for live webcasting today’s event to thousands of viewers all over the world. Although our club has been around since 1903, we have moved into the 21st century, and we are active on social media. Please, follow us on Twitter @Empire_Club, and visit us online at our website at www.empireclub.org. We also have Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram accounts.

Finally, our next event is a week today on October 6th. It is Patrick Brown, Leader of the Ontario PC Party. If you are interested, please, visit our website and purchase tickets.

That brings us to the end of today’s event. Thank you so much for coming. Thank you so much, Deryn, for addressing us on this important topic. I wish you all a great afternoon.