CanadianSME Small Business Magazine interviewed Saadia Muzaffar, the dynamic founder and president of TechGirls Canada, a not-for-profit championing women in STEM. Saadia delved into her personal trajectory leading to the inception of her impactful organization and illuminated her passion for tech and STEM diversity. Addressing the glacial progress in women’s representation in tech despite the undeniable benefits of diverse teams, she discussed the unique challenges immigrant women face, like wage disparities and underemployment, even as they dominate the women in STEM roles in Canada. Saadia underscored the distinction between mentorship and sponsorship, emphasizing the transformative power of sponsorship in STEM sectors. She elaborated on TechGirls Canada’s evidence-based program design, which caters to employers and significantly influences the career paths of immigrant women in STEM. Saadia’s insights serve as a beacon for budding entrepreneurs striving for impactful change in sectors where diversity and inclusion remain paramount yet elusive.
Saadia Muzaffar is a tech entrepreneur, author, and passionate advocate of responsible innovation, decent work for everyone, and the prosperity of immigrant talent in STEM. She is the founder of TGC, a national not-for-profit working to advance a STEM economy where women thrive – and co-founder of Tech Reset Canada, a group of business people, technologists, and other residents advocating for innovation that is focused on the public good. Saadia is featured in Canada 150 Women, a book about 150 of the most influential and groundbreaking women in Canada, and Toronto museum’s 2023 exhibit The 52: Stories of Women Who Transformed Toronto. She is honoured to serve on the board of Women’s Shelters Canada and the advisory board for the University of Guelph’s Centre for Advancing Responsible and Ethical Artificial Intelligence (CARE-AI). In 2023, she served as a Canadian delegate to the United Nations’ 67th Commission on the Status of Women.
Can you share your personal journey and experience leading up to the founding of your organization? What motivated you to focus on diversity in the tech and STEM sectors?
I was born and raised in Pakistan and immigrated to Canada with my family when I was 19 years old. My dad is an engineer and an entrepreneur, and watching him struggle to find meaningful work in his area of expertise was heartbreaking. I noticed in my own career in financial technology that women immigrants faced the same challenges, but in more exacerbated ways due to gender bias and lack of social supports, especially as newcomers. All of this made it very clear to me that the narrative around who belongs in STEM and who gets to build the future in an innovation economy like Canada’s needs to change. That is TechGirls Canada (TGC)’s origin story.
Even with the clear advantages of having diverse teams, the representation of women in the tech industry has seen only a slight rise over the past twenty years. What, in your opinion, are the reasons behind this slow progress?
Inclusion is ultimately a conversation about power, and the reason why our representation numbers have barely changed is that we have not had the difficult conversations we need around redistribution of power and privilege. We have tried everything from “unconscious bias” to “lean in” to sugar coat the truth which is to say that our institutions and systems are not built to accommodate anyone who is not a young, straight, non-disabled man. And there is a lot of active and passive resistance to changing these systems by those who actively benefit from the current status-quo. Until we name things accurately and design solutions around that power structure analysis that produces friction and defensiveness, we will continue to see well-intentioned efforts around DEI not produce the results so many of us want towards equity.
Immigrant women now make up a majority of women in STEM employment in Canada, yet face unique challenges such as a wage gap and higher rates of underemployment. What are the primary reasons for these challenges?
Immigrant women face a very specific set of challenges where they are simultaneously invisible and hypervisible. Despite their world-class experience and expertise, this high-potential and powerful talent pool faces the worst outcomes when it comes to unemployment, underemployment, and wage gap in Canada – yet in the vast majority of spaces where we are encouraging women and girls to choose STEM, we never hear the challenges faced by internationally trained immigrant women who were invited to Canada specifically because of their STEM expertise by our immigration system. In this way, despite their potential, they are invisiblized and not offered the supports that would help them land the jobs where they belong and to get paid equitably for equal work.
On the other hand, an immigrant woman cannot enter a room as just a STEM trained expert – her intersectional identities of being a woman, maybe a racialized woman who has a hijab and an accent, her immigration status, her international training and experience – also enter the room with her. In that way, these women are hypervisible and held to a higher and often arbitrary set of standards than others in the same labour market, which entrenches their under-employment, unemployment, and the persistent wage gap.
So like many situations women are forced to straddle, STEM-trained immigrant women are put in this impossible situation where there is no way for them to win.
This is why at TGC, we believe that improving economic equity for immigrant women in STEM will improve economic outcomes for all women in STEM.
Link to Statistics Canada and Women & Gender Equality Canada’s latest report
What according to you are the important factors that differentiate mentorship from sponsorship, and how does sponsorship offer a more significant impact in the tech and STEM sectors? Additionally, What are the cornerstone features of the evidence-based program design that your organization proposes for employers? How might this approach affect the career trajectory of immigrant women in STEM fields?
“While a mentor is someone who has knowledge and will share it with you, a sponsor is someone who has power and will use it for you,” wrote Professor Herminia Ibarra of London Business School in the Harvard Business Review.
When support systems are created to help underrepresented groups gain an equitable footing in any arena, it’s easy to think that the inequity is merely a lack of knowledge. So a lot of mentors in male-dominated STEM sectors give really well intentioned advice to STEM-trained immigrant women, primarily based on strategies that worked for them in their career, but we know from research that the same strategies of assertiveness, of shooting for the stars in vying for ambitious projects etc don’t work for their mentees. They also often do not have experience dealing with biases around gender, race, immigration status, and international training and education.
Sponsorship makes allies out of mentors. So you vouch for your mentee’s potential and experience in rooms where they are not present, you counter the “Canadian experience” barrier by calling it out as nonsensical against people who we know have come to Canada after a rigorous immigration verification process, and you use your social capital actively to clear the path for someone who probably does not look like you or share your lived experience. Sponsorship requires courage but produces far better results than saddling someone with the responsibility to contort themselves for biased systems.
What advice would you offer to aspiring entrepreneurs who aim to make a meaningful impact, especially in industries where diversity and inclusion are pressing issues?
My advice is to actively work to surround yourself with a small group of supporters who will help you recover faster from challenging situations and also keep you accountable to your goals, don’t be shy about reading and learning from people you admire yet forming your own differentiated outlook about how to solve the big problems of our time, and to not fall for the scarcity mindset when it comes to what it takes to create a meaningful, rich life. Be a mentor for those who are following behind you at all stages of your career. Ask for help. Stand your ground. Don’t be afraid to leave situations that don’t serve you. There is more than enough abundance for all of us to be good stewards of our communities and our troubled planet. Oh, and get good sleep. We can’t change systems if we allow them to burn us out.
