A Statistics Canada study came out this week looking at the difference between the wage gap that women with children face compared to women without children. The women with children had a bigger wage gap than those without.
I did a couple of interviews with the media about that, and I said that the reason the wage gap would be bigger for the women with children than the women without children is that as soon as a woman starts to have children where there is not a good-quality child care system, that impacts her ability to be in the workforce, to stay in the workforce, and that's when women start working part time because they don't have that kind of support. Women in this country are still having way more than their share of responsibility for child care, and now for elder care.
Those are the things that impact women's ability to work, which in turn impacts their ability to access EI. When they're working part-time contractor work, they can't get the hours they need to qualify for EI.