The frame of this is always the situation that we find ourselves in. We look back over the last 40 years and consider how our economy has grown. A third of the growth over the last 40 years has been women entering the workforce. Then you have to consider whether we have gone as far as we can go in this regard.
Women in Canada are in the workforce at a 61% workforce participation rate. Men are at a 70% workforce participation rate. That means we're eighth out of 29 OECD countries. In my estimation, we can do better than eighth out of 29.
In terms of equal pay for equal work, we have women earning about 88¢ on the dollar compared to men, for an equal amount of full-time work, if you want to look at it that way. That's about 15th out of 29.
What we're saying is that as we face a significant demographic challenge, because we're having more people retiring as the baby boomers retire, we need to make sure that all Canadians who want to work and have the capacity to have an impact are able to meet up with their full opportunities. That's the challenge we're facing. We think we can do better for women in this country, and we think that will have a really important impact for all Canadians.
It will also have a specific impact for women who actually find themselves in these advantageous situations. For the parental leave that you were talking about, the five-week “use it or lose it”, the idea is that we're going to get more second parents—and typically, it's men—taking time off. This is going to enable women to go back to the workforce more rapidly or in greater numbers.
The idea that we're putting in an additional amount of money through the BDC and EDC for women entrepreneurs means that there are more opportunities for women business leaders to be successful. It means for young women today that they'll see more opportunity in the future.
The fact that we put a significant amount of money into science and research and say that we want to tilt that towards younger, more female, more interdisciplinary work means that when a young girl is thinking about what field she might want to go into, she's likely to see more researchers who are going to be in science and engineering down the road because they will have more grants that will have been given to them.
These are all about the long-term idea that we want to see more success for women in our economy. It won't be done overnight, but I think the starting point that we began right at the very beginning of our government, where we looked to fill leadership positions with an equal number of men and women, and the continuing focus on how we can do better are going to have an impact.
Whether it's for the young women of today or a girl who's just thinking about what she's going to do, she'll see that she'll have more opportunity in the future, and that will end up being better for her. That will end up being better for our economy. Even for the people who don't buy into this, it will be better for them, so we're going to keep on it.