NEW AWARDS HONOUR WOMEN IN SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY, TRADES AND INDUSTRY

“It’s about time.”

That’s how Mandy Rennehan feels about the Women’s Executive Network recognizing women in her field with the new CP Industry Sector and Trades award this year.

Rennehan, CEO and founder of Freshco, a retail building and maintenance company, is a previous WXN Top 100 honouree and glad to see women in trades finally getting the recognition they deserve.

“If you didn’t have the trade industry you’d wake up with no bed, no shower, no soap, no car,” she said. “You literally wouldn’t have anything you’d need to function in the lives we live today.”

Natalie Dakers, founding president and CEO of Vancouver-based health sciences accelerator Accel-Rx, had the same sentiment about WXN’s other new addition this year: the Manulife Science and Technology award.

“It’s extremely important that we recognize women in this sector,” said Dakers, who has won WXN’s Trailblazers and Trendsetters award in 2016 and 2018. “We need to get more girls in science and technology generally, and to do that effectively, we need mentors to act as role models to motivate and inspire them. This is absolutely a meaningful way to address that challenge.”

Mentorship is something that comes naturally to Dr. Caroline Quach, a 2019 honouree and a microbiologist, epidemiologist and consultant on pediatric infectious disease at Centre hospitalier universitaire Sainte-Justine in Montreal.

“I really try to foster women’s careers in science and technology,” said Dr. Quach, a recipient of the inaugural Manulife Science and Technology Award. “I put all my networks to work for the students I mentor. I open doors for them, and all of them, so far, have been able to position themselves in various capacities that have made me proud.”

For Dr. Quach, studying science came naturally. Her father has a PhD and worked as an engineer, while her mother was a pharmacist.

“I come from a Vietnamese family where, since I had good grades, it was just natural that I went into medicine,” she said. “But I don’t think my family ever thought I’d end up doing research. It’s a fascinating career.”

Family also played a key role in the career path chosen by Cathy Press, president and CEO of Chinook Helicopters in Abbotsford, B.C. The flight training school was founded by her father, who included Press, his only child, in all aspects of the business from the start. She started flying when she was just 11 years old and flew solo for the first time at age 16.

“I was never excluded because of my age or sex,” said Press, a recipient of the CP Industrial Sector and Trades award. “My father was really good at including me in everything.”

When Press first got her helicopter licence in 1987, she was one of only six women in Canada licensed to fly a chopper. While there are plenty more now, she remains the only female examiner to do flight testing for Transport Canada, and the only person -- male or female -- who examines pilots both for helicopters and fixedwing planes.

While her family supported her desire to fly, teach and eventually run the flight training school, she has encountered sexism in the field.

“There was one very established chief pilot I met when I was a newer instructor,” she remembered. “He told me: ‘If girls were meant to fly, the sky would be pink.’”

Press pointed out to him that sometimes the sky is, indeed, pink. Years later, at the end of his career, that pilot ended up working for Press as an instructor at Chinook Helicopters. It was a classic case of “be careful what you say to people on the way up because you might meet them on the way down,” she said.

Dr. Foteini Agrafioti, another winner of the Manulife Science and Technology award, also remembers being the odd woman out in her younger years. She was one of six girls in a class of about 100 when she was studying to be an electrical engineer in her native Greece.

“It was pretty unnatural to think, at that time, that I would pursue the career that I did,” said Dr. Agrafioti, who immigrated to Canada to do a PhD at the University of Toronto in electrical and computer engineering, and has received numerous accolades for her professional achievements. She is currently the chief science officer at Royal Bank of Canada and head of Borealis AI, the bank’s independent artificial intelligence research arm.

Her biggest achievement, she said, is her contribution to reversing Canada’s brain drain south of the border by creating about 100 jobs in computer science and engineering at Borealis AI locations across Canada. She’s also proud of her track record on diversity.

“I only work with companies that have a very strong diversity focus, and RBC is one of them,” she said. “My leadership team is 60 per cent female, and I think a lot of our success is attributed to that: the diversity of opinions and voices that we hear.”

Aside from mentoring women and being on the board of the non-profit organization TechGirls Canada, Dr. Agrafioti takes a special interest in supporting immigrant women in STEM.

“Although we’re a very multicultural society, in leadership there’s usually not that much representation of that multiculturalism,” she said. “And there are added challenges for women trained in technology and science as they come to our country as immigrants. It’s something I relate to very well and something I’d like to help change.”

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