Last week, a group of female University of Toronto students spent time at Canada’s Parliament shadowing female Members of Parliament (MPs) as a part of the Women in House program, which accepts students from a range of programs and includes excursions to Ottawa landmarks. The program runs during the first week of March in honour of International Women’s Week.

Just one quarter of Canadian MPs are female.

To date, 85 female students and 50 different female parliamentarians have participated in the program.

Past hosts have included Elizabeth May, leader of the Green party; MP Peggy Nash; MP Carolyn Bennett; and Senator Yonah Martin.

Tina Park, a U of T PhD candidate, founded the Women in House program in fall 2012 along with Carolyn Bennett, MP for St. Paul’s.

Natalie Petra, who has been active in politics for about a decade and ran for City Council in the last municipal election, participated in this year’s program. She sat in on a caucus prep meeting, a hearing of the industry committee, and question period.

Petra shadowed Peggy Nash, MP for Parkdale-High Park. “It’s so valuable for future female leaders to be able to network and experience what it’s like to be a female in government. I recently read a statistic that said if you add up all the women who have ever been MPs, across all the governments in Canadian history and sat them in the House of Commons together, there would still be over 50 empty seats,” Petra says.

“To be able to learn from strong experienced women who have found success in the institutions that govern our nation is invaluable,” she adds.

This year, Rachel J. Gunn, a past participant, was selected to assist in logistics and planning. In 2014, Gunn shadowed MP Laurin Liu in the Committee on International Trade.

Liu was the youngest MP to be elected to parliament and was the only female MP in the Committee on International Trade.

“This brought to mind a common issue among high achieving women — the ‘imposter syndrome,’ where relative to our male peers, we tend to underestimate our competence and potential. Her example powerfully demonstrated that age and gender should not limit our aspirations,” Gunn says of her experience.

“I hope the program continues to grow, and do hope that this program could help us take one more step towards promoting gender equity in our Canadian society,” says Park.