Thank you very much, and thank you all for being here today.
I want to focus the first part on pay equity. What we see here with Bill C-86 is the advancement of something quite important, something that we've been talking about doing as a country for a number of decades. While there are concerns that we've heard expressed, concerns that the bill isn't perfect, I don't think we live in a perfect world. What I want to put on the table is the fact that Bill C-86 and the pay equity provisions apply to federally regulated workplaces. However, there is a great deal to be said about the potential for this to go beyond, and now we can really begin a substantive conversation about pay equity in the wider society.
As part of that, I would like to get the view of those at the table on the existing reasons for a gap in pay between men and women. On the one hand, we can talk about structural barriers and the differences between men and women as well as false perceptions about what women can offer in the workplace and what men can offer.
Beyond that, though, there are other views. Mr. Cross, I don't mean to set this up as a straw-man argument, and I'll come back to you for your view, but your organization, the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, has said, and I quote here from your website:
The reasons for the pay gap between men and women are not particularly new. Women tend to be clustered in fields that traditionally pay less than the ones that men choose, and in occupations that pay less as well. They are also a lot more likely than men to take “breaks” from work (a really poor word to express what happens when you are home with small children), which does not help their long-term earnings power either.
That's the end of the quote. I wonder if we could delve into that.
Ms. Decter, I'll go to you first, and then Ms. Doucet. Do you agree with that particular view? Should we focus instead on structural barriers as we open up a conversation in the wider society about how to decrease the gap in pay between men and women?