Pay Equity committee  In my presentation I mentioned the factors that contribute to the wage gap, but there's a variety of different items right now in the mandate letters of various ministers that could actually play into the wage gap. There's developing a national child care framework, working on a poverty strategy, working on more flexible work arrangements, and working more with the Department of Employment and Social Development on enhancing women in apprenticeships and in the trades.

Pay Equity committee  If I could just add one thing from Status of Women. When FEWO studied this in the past, the recommendation was for the Departments of Justice and Labour to continue to lead the work on it and I believe that was back in 2004. There is definitely a role for the Department of Justice in this as well.

Pay Equity committee  No, I think I had better pass.

Pay Equity committee  Yes, I would add to that and, again, it's really important to differentiate between pay equity and wage gaps. I'm not sure if your question was just about pay equity.

Pay Equity committee  Yes, as my colleague pointed out, Finland would certainly be a good place to start on wage gaps. Again, the Nordic countries have all sorts of different responses to wage gaps, including ways of helping women work more flexible hours, better child care regimes than perhaps we have in Canada right now, subsidized elder care, parental benefits, etc.

Pay Equity committee  I don't know if there are discussions going on about pay equity in particular as part of CSR, corporate social responsibility. There's a lot of work going on with the private sector, with corporations, and with the non-profit sector to focus on equality issues in general, whether that be with women on boards, having more diverse workforces, or working with the science and technology or trade sectors to try to get them to recruit more women and offer more training for women.

Pay Equity committee  Our role is more of a challenge function, as I say in the last slide, so we wouldn't actually have a concrete role in developing or implementing any apparent legislation.

Pay Equity committee  As we mentioned at the beginning of the presentation, there are different ways of measuring this. But some of what is affecting the wage gap—and whether or not it's within the definition of pay equity, I'm not sure—has to do with hidden ways of compensating men. If you look at my diagram that talks about how many women are at the very top rates of the management echelon.

Pay Equity committee  That's a complicated question with a complicated answer.

Pay Equity committee  If I understand the question properly.... Is it why indigenous women earn significantly less than indigenous men or non-indigenous men, or both?

Pay Equity committee  It would be related to all of the factors that I stated within the presentation, so part-time work, labour market segmentation, inability to work at all because of lack of supports and education, but also all of the other social issues that affect indigenous communities. The list is very long and I'm not the proper person to go into all of that, but these are all of the issues that are plaguing reserves in Canada today, including lower levels of education, etc.

Pay Equity committee  I believe Status of Women will start and then Treasury Board and then labour.

Pay Equity committee  Thank you. Good afternoon, committee members. We just want to give you a very high-level overview of the wage gap, which is significantly different from pay equity, but it gives you a sense of the broader context. On slide 2 we give some definitions of what the gender wage gap is, which is the ratio of aggregate female to male wages, and it's used generally to measure income disparity between men and women.

Status of Women committee  I believe this committee has studied best practices to address violence against women fairly recently, so that would be something of interest to take a look at.

Status of Women committee  Chair, if I could jump in, this is one of the situations in which Status of Women is an enabler, an organization that works with other federal organizations to ensure there's a gender lens in the programs and policies that are being developed. It's related to the wage gap strategy and doing something to focus on women who are in poverty to ensure they can have the tools and resources to get out of poverty.