Pay equity and equal pay for equal work are probably the two most common and known ways to value women's work, because it has been traditionally undervalued. The impact it has on the gender wage gap would be impossible to measure. We have tried. I've had lots of conversations with Quebec over this issue. At the end of the day—I'm not a statistician, so I can't really tell you why—the wage gap is caused by so many factors that have nothing to do with discrimination. They have to do with accessible child care. They have to do with part-time versus full-time work. They have to do with choices that people make in terms of the careers they go into, yet those careers that they choose sometimes are undervalued because they're women's work.
There are way too many factors to be able to say “This thing will do that to the wage gap”. It's unfortunate, because now we spend too much time focusing on some number that even statisticians have a difficult time explaining. I think when you step back, you just say that we have a gender wage gap, which demonstrates that there are gender stereotypes and social norms and biases creeping in everywhere in our system, and those need to be addressed.
Then move that aside and really look at the issue, which is women's economic participation. You have a labour force now that is 50% women. We have graduation rates at all levels of schooling that is primarily done by women. Are we getting our return on our educational investment, as a society and as individuals and as families, if then we don't value the work women do in our society just because they're women, as I think the witnesses from NAWL said?
It's an economic issue, really. I think if you get hung up too much on whether the wage gap is 30% or 28% or 26%, you're really not getting to the issue. You're allowing that conversation to take over when everybody knows what many of the remedies are. If you start looking at countries where the wage gap is consistently very narrow, you will see that there is a panoply of support systems that allow women to participate fully in the economic sphere.
To me, yes, it's definitely a human right. Without a doubt it's a human right. But boy, it's also a big economic issue. If we're going to undervalue half of our labour force, I think we should all be giving our heads a shake.