Canada's gender gap

International Women’s Day is approaching in less than two weeks, and the Canadian Feminist Alliance for International Action and Canadian Labour Congress don’t have great news for women as we prepare to mark that day. In a report released yesterday, they note that the rights of women are being systematically eroded in Canada.

The report is a submission to a special session of the United Nations taking place in March on the fifteenth anniversary of the Beijing conference and Declaration. The Government of Canada has also submitted a report, highlighting what it considers progress on Canada’s plan of action adopted in Beijing.

Reality Check: Women in Canada and the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action Fifteen Years On highlights a number of critical areas regarding women’s rights in Canada, including women’s poverty, violence against women, and women’s participation in the economy. Among the report’s major concerns are the cuts to Status of Women Canada and to funding for non-governmental women’s advocacy groups; the elimination of the national childcare program and the inadequacy of the Universal Child Care Benefit; and women’s employment situation, including the wage gap.

It’s a sobering report, and reminds us that the hard work of fighting for public justice for women is far from over.

The report is also not without a backlash. The Examiner had a column today by Brian Lilley, criticizing the report for its presentation of women’s work and the wage gap. I will leave some of the arguments over how wage data is calculated to others more knowledgeable, but some of Lilley’s points need to be addressed.

For one thing, he misrepresents what the report actually says when he states that “The report, dubbed a reality check by its authors, looks at the government's claim that women earn 84 cents for every dollar a man makes and they dismiss it. Their reason for doing so? The government does not use the correct data.”

Actually, the authors acknowledge the Statistics Canada data on average hourly earnings. However, when they examine the situation of women’s income, they look at average yearly earnings from full-time work in order to understand “the impact of lower hourly wages with fewer weeks and hours worked over the year.” This makes sense – average hourly earnings are pretty limited data for understanding the full scope of women’s income versus men’s income. If at the end of the week – and the end of the year – women are taking home less money than men for full-time work (and Statistics Canada defines full-time work as anything over 30 hours a week), women are going to have significantly less money to spend on food, shelter, clothing, transportation, health and personal care, and other basic necessities. This differential is a huge cause of women’s higher rates of poverty compared to men’s.

Lilley contends that women “choose” to work part-time, but he doesn’t go into any of the factors that force many women to “choose” part-time hours. The lack of a national childcare program is a big part of it, since women generally have more responsibilities for caring work than men. Women also, on average, engage in far more unpaid labour on a weekly basis than men. Finally, some women are forced into part-time work because precarious work (part-time and/or temporary) is increasing as a proportion of our economy and good jobs are just hard to find.

Lilley also suggests that if women choose to go into fields of employment that are poorly paid, their wages are a result of personal choice. Once again, Lilley ignores all the factors that result in women choosing certain professions over others, including socialization, discrimination in education, and corporate environments that discourage women. He also never seems to question why it is that women-dominated professions are paid less than male-dominated professions; he seems to think this difference ever was and ever shall be, and if women want to be paid more, they should start choosing the better paid professions.

Finally, Lilley implies that women’s employment situation is quite rosy because women didn’t experience the same kind of layoffs that men just did in the recession. While it’s true that men were far more likely to lose their job during this recession (206,000 jobs lost for men 25-54 compared to 68,900) for women, I wouldn’t start throwing that parade yet. Those unemployed men were far more likely than unemployed women to qualify for Employment Insurance benefits. Prior to the recession, 46% of unemployed men received benefits, compared to 39% of unemployed women. During the recession, the number of male beneficiaries increased faster than the rate of men’s unemployment. Not so for women, who only just kept pace. So women are more likely than men to be without the safety net of EI if they lose their jobs.

The bottom line is that no matter how you spin it, we have a lot of work to do towards women’s equality in Canada.