Canadian Immigrant Women Engineers' Work and Life: Experiences and Change

The number of women in engineering, in Canada, is growing, yet men and Canadian- educated women engineers continue to outnumber immigrant women engineers especially at the upper level of the profession. For the last 10 years, the majority of immigrants to Canada have been mostly comprised of highly educated, internationally trained professionals, many of whom are women. Many of these women hold university degrees in engineering and other academic disciplines and almost all of them have work experience in their professions. Yet few immigrant women engineers are reentering their profession in Canada and only a handful of them advance in their career, despite a decade long effort by Canadian educational institutions, the Canadian government, and Ontario’s engineering regulatory body to involve more women into the profession.

In this paper I introduce the analytic complexities that I will examine in my doctoral research whose theme is an intersectional analysis of the changing experiences of immigrant women engineers in Canada, from various educational, ethnic/race/national origin and social class backgrounds. Based on life history interviews, completed by statistical and other research literature, this paper proposes research which will explore influential social and environmental factors that have shaped immigrant women’s professional and life experiences and contributed to their underrepresentation in the profession in Canada for the last 10 years, in an intersectional analysis of gender, race/ethnicity/birthplace, and class relations which considers changes or their absence over time.