What we did was look at the initiatives of other countries to get some sense of what they were doing. They didn't in fact specifically focus on women, but they did develop composite indices. Then we looked at the research around women's income, both within families and individual women. On the basis of that, we developed four indicators that we felt were important--from our research, anyway--to add, because it provides a multi-dimensional....
The good thing about the composite indices that have been developed in Europe particularly is that some of them show in fact that different people will turn up as being poor, depending upon the indicator used. And I guess it's reinforcing the point that Richard made--depending upon your definition, what you include.
We felt that for women in particular there were four areas: around education, because their level of education oftentimes is influenced considerably differently from that of men; health indicators, because life expectancy, maternal mortality, violence, and so forth affect women's ability to work; the quality of housing, and those kinds of measures, to some extent, have already been developed, particularly in the housing standards; and employment indicators, in terms of their employment, the record of employment participation, the longevity of their employment, things of that sort, and also in relation to the family support.
One of the astonishing things that still persist is this. Unfortunately I have not seen studies in Canada, but there are certainly studies done in most European countries and several countries around the world on the differential incomes within families. For a variety of reasons, low-income women are disproportionately disadvantaged in that respect. So we feel it would be important to have indicators related to what's going on within the family, around the kinds of supports they're getting, the kind of independence they have in terms of their income sources, and so on.
Those are the kinds of indicators we felt were possible. Those various indicators have already been tested to some extent for other groups in other countries, so they are possible.