Sure.
The best way for me to explain it—and Angela may want to add something—is to give you a practical example of where I think we misunderstand gender in terms of the policy process.
There appears to be, in Scotland, a practice of viewing gender as synonymous with women and viewing gender issues or dealing with gender issues as dealing with women's issues. Understanding that, yes, there are a lot of issues that we need to deal with that are focused on women, as we all know that's not what we mean by gender-sensitive analysis.
The example I'd like to give to you relates to some work we've been doing around one of our skills training programs for young people in Scotland. We call it the modern apprenticeships program. I don't know if you have anything similar in Canada, but it's a government-funded training program that supports young people at an entry level into the labour market to gain skills that give them a trade.
We noticed early on, through the work of the Scottish Women's Budget Group, that the program seemed to be dominated by young men. There may be reasons for that, and maybe very good reasons, but we campaigned on it and indicated to the government that their spending may be allocated or may be benefiting young men predominantly and there may be a problem there.
Three years later, when we looked at the program again, a lot of work was done to encourage young women into the program. We looked at the figures, and yes, young women had increased their participation rates by 211% over three years as a result of direct action by the government to encourage young women.
The government used that as a mechanism to say that they had done gender or had considered gender. However, when we looked at the allocation or the nature of the participation of young men and women, we found that young men were participating in the program in the four-year-long funded training programs—plumbing, construction, etc.—and therefore were benefiting from quite a significant degree of spending and were gaining access to good trades when they finished. Young women, however, were participating in six-month-long training programs in hairdressing, child care, and the retail industry and were not benefiting from well-paid jobs or good career-oriented jobs at the end.
Therefore, there was a significant difference in terms of the nature of participation. However, the Scottish government viewed the head count aspect of gender issues—that is, they had increased the numbers of women, therefore they had addressed that gender inequality.
For me, that stems from a lack of understanding of what gender issues are. Merely adding women into the scenario and increasing the numbers of women does not mean you've dealt with gender inequalities.
I think that's quite a useful example to illustrate how gender is misunderstood in the policy process.