Status of Women Committee on April 17th, 2008

[Sheila Regehr]

New Zealand and Australia are also going that way. Canada really is out of step.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Patricia Davidson]

Thank you very much.

We will now move to Ms. Mathyssen, for five minutes, please.

[Irene Mathyssen, NDP, London—Fanshawe, ON]

Thank you.

I'm going to throw this question out. We have lots of data, or there's an indication that Stats Canada is collecting all kinds of data in regard to housing, affordability of housing, availability of housing, women's participation in the labour force, and women's participation in terms of political and social engagement. In terms of what Madam Demers was talking about, all of this data is collected, and I assume that it must be analyzed to a degree. What is it telling us? For example, there's a labour shortage in Canada, and in Quebec we know there is a first-rate child care system in place, and as a result, women in Quebec are participating in the labour force in greater numbers than in the rest of the Canadian population.

So we have all this data and we can analyze it. What does it tell us in terms of those areas I've just hit on?

[Heather Dryburgh]

The analysis that comes out of Statistics Canada is meant to be objective information provided to policy departments. We do produce all of this information, we do analyze the results, and then it's up to the policy departments to kind of take it.

I think the step you're talking about is the next step: asking what this means and what policy should be in place because of it. That's where Statistics Canada steps back, and purposely so, so that we're not necessarily influencing the results we put out because we have a particular project or goal in mind.

Definitely there are lots of results in Women in Canada that should give a sense of how Canadian women are doing. In terms of the income wage gap, it hasn't really changed over the last seven, eight, nine years. It's remained at about 30%, and doesn't seem to be changing.

Recent analysis looking at the wage gap for young women—thinking that maybe the baby boomers still going through are having a negative impact—finds that even amongst young women who are highly educated, there's still a 20% gap. It's probably related to occupational segregation: women are in jobs where the real wage isn't improving, while the men are in jobs where it is.

It's kind of a complex picture. I guess as a general statement, what we produce are the numbers, and that's as far as we go. So it's up to the political people and the policy departments to take the next step.

[Irene Mathyssen, NDP, London—Fanshawe, ON]

Sheila, do you have anything to add?

[Sheila Regehr]

No, only that I would agree with Heather very much. The wealth of data is there. It really is up to departments to analyze it. I am not sure that I am confident at this point in time that there is a really strong analytical capability in government, and I think there's a strong argument to be made for really needing to bring in stakeholders in a very major way to help sort some of these things out. It goes back to my example of the aboriginal reserve.

There are some very basic common sense things that people know, that the data are never going to tell you. You need to talk to people. I think there are some capacity issues in departments. In my own experience, and I've been in the federal government for more than 25 years, the analytical capacity is not what it was when I started. It's not there. It needs help. I think it's important that that be done.

[Irene Mathyssen, NDP, London—Fanshawe, ON]

We had talked in this committee about opening up the pre-budget consultation and that process to involve more NGOs and more of those organizations that can provide us with the research. Would that help to improve this analytical perspective? Would government benefit then from having a broader consultation before the fact?

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Patricia Davidson]

The time is up, but we'll let the answer come to this last question, please.

[Sheila Regehr]

Only if people are listened to. I know non-governmental organizations that have made presentation after presentation after presentation and have said the same thing for years and years and years to pre-budget committees, and there's no evidence that anybody heard anything they said. It's a huge frustration.

I think that is changing, but it's still a lot of work. I think very often people in different parts of government speak really different languages. Sometimes the finance people and the social people and the bureaucrats and the public have a hard time understanding each other.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Patricia Davidson]

Thank you.

Now we will move on to Ms. Grewal for five minutes, please.

[Nina Grewal, Conservative, Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

In your opinion are there any areas that have not been explored, for which we do not have an adequate understanding of the differences between men and women? How are the statistics compiled? How do you gather the raw material? That's what I want to know.

[Heather Dryburgh]

To the first question, I think there's always more one can do. What you heard earlier from Status of Women Canada is true. I manage the general social survey, which has 25,000 respondents. So if we want to look at women in a particular geographic area, broken down by age and minority status, and so on, you will pretty soon have such low cell counts that the results are not releasable. So there's always more you can do. There is a wealth of data that probably isn't being adequately used, so there's a fine line there.

As to how we collect the data, we have administrative data that comes from the provinces, for example, health data on visits to doctors, and education data on enrolments. We also have survey data, usually developed in collaboration and consultation with all of the key stakeholders, including consultations with academics and expert researchers in the area. And we fall under a structure of an advisory committee, which provides expert advice on all of our surveys; and steering committees are usually directly involved too, which include representatives from the policy departments. The advisory committees are broader; they're usually made up of academic researchers, and NGOs sometimes, or a variety of people who have a stake in the result. That's how we go about developing the survey content.

I think it's important for the committee to know that part of what we do in that consultation or what we are counting on from our key stakeholders is for them, having done their gender-based analysis, to raise with us the issues that we need to know about in order to prepare a good questionnaire. I'll just give you a quick example. We just did a survey on older Canadians, 45 and older, and one of the topics we were asking about was retirement. When we consulted with our partners at HRSDC, they told us that retirement readiness is a different issue for women and men, because women have perhaps had work interruptions through their careers, having taken time off to do care, and so on. So if we don't have an adequate sense from the data whether this has happened to the particular women we're looking at, then we won't really be able to answer some of our key policy questions.

Given that, we then develop a questionnaire that will allow them to do that kind of analysis. So that consultation process is where there's a real opportunity to provide better data on gender.

[Nina Grewal, Conservative, Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC]

And who decides what areas of life we should study when you provide us with the gender statistics?

[Heather Dryburgh]

Those, again, are decided in consultation. If you're talking about the Women in Canada book, definitely, Status of Women Canada brings its expertise to the table.

Also, as I said, we're involved in international groups. A lot of work is being done around the world on this issue, so we try to keep up to date on that.

Our academic people are usually at the cutting edge of what's happening, and we also listen to them.

[Nina Grewal, Conservative, Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC]

Madam Chair, do I have some time left?

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Patricia Davidson]

Yes, you have about 45 seconds left.

[Nina Grewal, Conservative, Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC]

What methods does HRSDC use to gather data on gender differences?

[Heather Dryburgh]

I missed the question, sorry.

[Nina Grewal, Conservative, Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC]

What types of methods does HRSDC use to gather data on gender differences?

[Heather Dryburgh]

They have some of their own projects under way. Sometimes they contract out small projects. I don't know if that's what you're referring to.

Most of their data does come through Statistics Canada. They're very involved with us. They're on our steering committees, so that we understand their policy needs. On the social side, they're quite involved.

I'm not sure I fully understood your question.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Patricia Davidson]

Thank you, Ms. Grewal.

We will now move to Ms. Neville, for five minutes, please.

[Anita Neville, Liberal, Winnipeg South Centre, MB]

Thank you very much, and thank you to the five of you for coming here this morning.

Ms. Dryburgh, you just gave a good example with the HRSDC statistic, which pre-empted a little bit of the question I was going to ask Ms. Regehr.

Ms. Regehr, in your comments--I think I took it down correctly--you said that traditional poverty indicators don't capture women's reality. You just gave an example of women's reality not being captured.

I have here the indicators on women in poverty. What else could be and should be done to accurately reflect women's reality, whether it's related to poverty or related to retirement, which could also have a poverty aspect? How do we get that texture in the statistics?

I have an added comment. Ms. Regehr, you talked about the different languages in the not-for-profit, government, and whatever sectors. I'm certainly hearing here this morning that there are very different realities and languages reflected by the organizations that are presenting. So how do we capture the reality?

[Sheila Regehr]

I'll try to answer quite briefly.

The comments I was referring to were made by Glenn Drover, who was representing the Canadian Association of Social Workers, which has done a lot of work on women in the economy recently. He was referring to standard measures that both Statistics Canada and HRSDC produce on poverty. There are LICOs, LIMs, pre- and post-tax--the standard kinds of things--and the market basket measure. All these things use household measures, which means that the power imbalances within households are not reflected. There may be women living in very straitened, almost desperate circumstances in households that actually do have some money and wouldn't fall under the thresholds for any of those indicators.

Now, there are only so many things you can do with any one indicator. Again, it seems to be an area of convergence among people working in indicators that we are not going to find the poverty line. We need several measures, a suite of measures, not a gazillion, but a few key ones, and more than one, that will give us a better understanding.

If you, for example, took key poverty measures, if we picked three--most countries seem to have done something like that--and complemented those with things like the economic gender-equality indicators that show what's going on in the labour force, how the tax system is impacting gender equality, and what time use looks like, then you'd get a much better sense of why and how women always end up featuring more prominently in the poverty statistics.

In that aggregate collection of things there's no one measure that's going to give an answer, but those couple of key things--unpaid work, Suzanne mentioned violence as the other key.... It's not just a matter of disaggregating. It's making a deliberate attempt to build statistics about something that we traditionally didn't do for a long time. Those are the two key areas--the non-market and whatever--and with those, I think we could do a good job.

[Anita Neville, Liberal, Winnipeg South Centre, MB]

Ms. Dryburgh, do you want to comment?

[Heather Dryburgh]

I agree that the value of having an indicator at a high level is that you can kind of, at a glance, get a sense of things. But you really need to dig deeper to get a real idea of what the issues are and of what's explaining the situation. That's the disadvantage of the indicator; sometimes it masks those kinds of things.