It just so happens that I'm on the Statistics Canada advisory committee on social conditions. We had a meeting recently in which we were told that this division of Statistics Canada is actually doing quite a bit of work on rural communities now. This is kind of a new push. Maybe other people from StatsCan may be able to fill you in on this. I'm not sure if it's specifically with regard to women, but certainly there's growing interest in looking at rural communities from a statistical viewpoint.
On February 15th, 2007. See this statement in context.