Thank you very much for inviting me to speak before you today. I know that you've already heard from the National Council of Welfare and the National Advisory Council on Aging, among others. Those organizations presented you with detailed information about the economic situation of senior women and about programs and policies that affect them. What I have to say today may repeat some of what they've already told you, but I think to some extent that's inevitable.
I'm going to base some of my comments today on a comprehensive report I wrote for Status of Women Canada's policy research fund, which you may have seen. It's called Reducing Poverty Among Older Women: the Potential of Retirement Incomes Policies. In that report, you'll find a detailed analysis and recommendations. Perhaps I can direct you to it for more details.
The good news, of course, is that Canada has made quite a bit of progress in improving economic security for senior women over the past 20 years or so, thanks largely to our public pension programs, such as OAS, GIS, and the Canada and Quebec Pension Plans. After taking government transfers and taxes into account, about 7% of senior women lived in low income in 2004, although that was double the rate of senior men who had low incomes. This compares with a low income rate of 12.8% among Canadians under age 18, which is the number that is usually used to measure what we call “child poverty”, and it compares with a low income rate of 11.7% of all Canadians aged 18 to 64.
But there's one group of senior women who have a much higher rate of low income, and that's senior women on their own. In 2004, 17% had incomes that were below Statistics Canada's after-tax low income cut-off. The depth of their poverty—that is, the average amount by which they fell below the cut-off—was estimated at $2,100.
I think it's worth noting here that women who were lone-parent heads of families in 2004 had a low income rate of 35.6% and an average depth of poverty of $6,300. So they are in much more serious condition than senior women, of course.
Retirement income policies could be used to reduce poverty among future elders and to ensure the financial security of women in old age in two ways: they could mitigate poverty in old age by providing benefits to poor women once they are old; and/or, they could assist women through a variety of measures that would improve their ability to accumulate retirement income throughout their lifetimes.
Other people who have appeared before you I think have pointed out that economic security for senior women depends largely on events that they experienced earlier in their lifetimes. For instance, some women who are currently aged 65 or older perhaps did not work outside their homes for significant periods of time and so weren't able to build up pension incomes in their old age. As of 2004, for example, Statistics Canada reports that about 17% of women now aged 65 or older had never been part of the paid workforce.
But most women in younger age groups now have paid employment, and the expectation is that their future financial security will be much better than that of the current generation of senior women. Personally, I think that assumption is far too optimistic, and I'll give you some of the reasons why. While there are now more women in the paid labour force than ever before, their wages still lag far behind those of men. Last year, for example, 82% of women in the age group 25 to 44—and those are the main childbearing years, of course—were in the paid workforce. But women earned only 63% of the average earnings of men. And that's exactly where they were 10 years earlier, in 1995.
If we look at women employed full-time for a full year, their earnings were just 70% of the average earnings of men in 2004. And about 20% of women, compared with just 10% of men, who had full-time jobs that year were employed in low-wage occupations.
Implementing pay equity, of course, might help some of the women who are employed full time, but as I think you've already heard, more and more women in paid employment are no longer working full time for a full year. They are part of the contingent workforce; they are working in part-time jobs, employed through temporary help agencies or on call, working in casual jobs, or are self-employed and working on their own.
Those are precarious jobs. They're generally poorly paid and they have no benefits like pensions. There is little or no job security, and about 40% of women who have jobs are now employed in those kinds of jobs.
Women in paid employment generally don't earn enough to be able to save for their own retirement through RRSPs, and most of them are not covered by workplace pension plans either.
In case you think women are choosing to work part time because they can combine part-time work with caring for their families, you should know that about one-third of women in the main childbearing years are working part time because they can't find full-time work. That's about the same percentage as are working part time because they're caring for children.
When women lose their jobs, they generally can no longer qualify for what we used to call unemployment insurance. Back in the 1980s, 70% of unemployed women got benefits. Then in 1996 the rules were changed, and the program was renamed employment insurance. Now only about 32% of unemployed women, compared with 40% of unemployed men, get employment insurance benefits, which replace about 55% of their usual earnings when they're out of work. In some parts of the country, coverage is much lower than that. In Ontario, for instance, only 23% of unemployed women get EI benefits.
This denial of temporary income support has serious consequences for women and their families, not just in terms of current income, but for their future financial security when they are older. What's happening to these younger women will have an important bearing on their economic security when they grow old, and that's why I think we need a national strategy to improve women's economic security.
It must take into account the origins of older women's poverty, including women's lower earnings; their family responsibilities; the way in which they combine paid and unpaid work during their lifetimes; the changing structure of the paid workforce; and the fact that women, because of their greater life expectancy, will spend longer in old age, on average, than men will, and will likely be left on their own eventually.
We also need to review such income support programs as EI, public pensions, social assistance, and legal aid, and to make sure that such reviews include a thorough gender analysis if we want to make any progress in improving women's economic security, and of course it goes without saying that we need to pay special attention to those groups of women who face particular disadvantages, such as lone parents, aboriginal women, immigrant women, and racialized women.