Thank you.
Good evening, and thank you to the committee for inviting me to be here today. My name is Kate McInturff, and I'm a senior researcher at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.
Today in Canada our daughters are as likely to attend university as our sons are, but we are in danger of failing to deliver on the promise of education, because those girls will grow up and graduate to a pay gap—unless we act now. Karma doesn't cut it. Doing nothing, leaving pay to the forces of the market, gives us what we have today, a widening gap between men's and women's rates of pay.
Let me repeat that: the gap in men's and women's full-time wages is growing right now in Canada, not shrinking.
The cost of continuing to underemploy and underpay women in our workforce is high at a time when we can little afford it. Closing the gender gap is a key part of the return to strong growth in Canada's economy and security for Canadians. The OECD projects that narrowing the gap between men's and women's employment in Canada by 50% could contribute an additional $160 billion to our economy by 2030. Research published by the World Bank suggests that closing the gender wage gap could be worth the equivalent of 10% of Canada's GDP. That's not nothing—not to our economy, not to women.
What causes the gap? One of the major forces contributing to the gap in men's and women's wages is the unequal distribution of unpaid work. Women in Canada continue to spend twice as much time on unpaid care work as do men. As long as there are only 24 hours in a day, that will put an absolute limit on the number of hours of paid work women can take up. More to the point, it also limits the kinds of paid work women can do, which is one of the reasons we see a concentration of women in occupations with hours that accommodate their unpaid work—occupations like nursing, teaching, and retail sales.
We also see an overrepresentation of women in part-time work. Women are three times as likely to work part time as are men. Nearly a third of the women who work part time cite family care as the reason they do so.
Finally, the kinds of work that women have historically performed without pay, caregiving and housework, are undervalued. Early childhood educators, health care workers, and housekeepers, all highly predominantly female occupations, are amongst the lowest-paid occupational sectors in our economy. Occupational segregation is itself a major factor in creating the pay gap. Men and women tend to work in different occupations. That in itself should not necessarily lead to a pay gap, not if we value the work of women and men equally. However, it does, and we evidently do not.
We also see that as the share of women in a field increases, the wages in that field stagnate or decrease. That is why leaving it to the magic of the marketplace will only produce more of what we already have, which is unfair and unequal rates of pay. Not all women are the same. The wage gap widens for aboriginal women, racialized women, for women with disabilities, and for immigrant women. This is in spite of the fact that immigrant women as a group, for example, are more highly educated than non-immigrant women as a group. Aboriginal women have seen one of the fastest increases in their levels of higher education amongst any group in our workforce, yet the wage gap actually gets larger for aboriginal women with university degrees as opposed to those with only high school degrees.
Finally, women with different levels of education respond differently to policy interventions. Some, for example, benefit from longer periods of parental leave, particularly women with lower levels of education, while women with higher levels of education do not. These differences can exacerbate and complicate attempts to narrow the wage gap. It means that the policy solutions must address these intersecting dynamics of discrimination and income equality in order to close the gap.
What does work in order to close the gap? Well, the first step in fixing a problem is realizing that you have one. Systematically tracking wages is essential to addressing that gap. The second step is to do something about it once you've found it. Wage-setting policies are particularly important in expanding the choices available for women at every income level, but particularly for low-income women. Higher minimum wages and collective bargaining narrow the wage gap where it makes the biggest difference—for women with lower educational levels and lower earning potential.
Next, women's double burden of unpaid work has to be addressed. There's comprehensive evidence from across OECD countries, including Canada, that paid parental leave and affordable and available child care narrow the wage gap.
Most parents in Canada are working parents. The majority of women with young children are working women by choice or necessity. That is the reality. When child care is available and the cost does not consume a third of median female wages, which it does in almost every city in Canada outside of Quebec today, then women are able to make real choices about how and when they return to paid work.
Finally, research also finds that policies that support work-life balance are not in themselves sufficient. The impact of these policies is shaped by social attitudes. Where societies value women's work, progressive family policies can have a significant impact on the pay and employment gap; where they do not, women continue to struggle for fair treatment in the workplace. That means that any policy or legislation aimed at narrowing the gap must also be paired with broader efforts to address discriminatory attitudes toward the role of women. The persistence of economic inequality across gender and racial lines is underwritten by social inequalities. The gaps in employment and wages that occur in spite of equal or even superior levels of education and experience demonstrate the persistence of underlying bias, a bias which sees traditionally male occupations as deserving of higher enumeration, which undervalues historically female occupations and work, paid or unpaid, and which puts a premium on hiring male workers.
The male breadwinner model of economic and family life no longer reflects the real choices being made by Canadians. This means that social policy must be twinned with economic policy in order to ensure that all the barriers to equality are removed.
The gap in pay is a complicated problem with complicated solutions, but we do have solutions. The 2004 pay equity task force provided a comprehensive foundation for moving forward, and move forward we must, because the cost of doing nothing is too high.
Thank you.