Shannon Cuykendall gives a presentation about her research on generative artificial intelligence with one hand, while holding her six-month-old son in the other.

Cuykendall is a postdoctoral researcher at Simon Fraser University's iViz Lab, a majority-female AI lab in a field dominated by men.

In Canada, women make up less than one-quarter of the people employed in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) careers, according to the federal government. But 75 per cent of researchers at the …