Thank you very much for inviting me. I am very pleased to be able to present.
I'm an economist also, and I have written widely on how every income security policy plays out differently for men and women, given that they have different labour market patterns and caregiving responsibilities. One has to be very careful to avoid implicit gender biases in the parameters of the program.
I began looking at EI when it was first introduced, and early on I wrote an article on expected impacts of the reform, including gender differences. In general, the new program parameters reflected a male norm of full-time, continuous work, which made it more difficult for women and others whose work patterns differed from this.
Like others who you've probably heard present, I anticipated the impacts as being, first, that the eligibility requirements and duration of benefits were calculated such that the change to hours hurt anyone working less than 35 hours per week, and as we have heard, that is disproportionately women.
Furthermore, in terms of the re-entrant rules that were introduced, the big increase in hours needed for re-entrants made it particularly difficult for women who may have more labour market interruptions due to caregiving responsibilities.
Third, the formula to calculate benefits, especially the use of a minimum divisor—about which we can talk in more detail later—penalized anybody with irregular or fluctuating earnings. Again, that was an issue for women as well as other precarious workers, as Ernie has mentioned.
The application of the new EI parameters to parental and maternity benefits was also problematic.
And finally, access to training became more tied to EI eligibility, which also meant that women and other precarious workers were having more difficulty accessing the kind of programs that might help them get into better jobs.
Since that article, I conducted three evaluation reports for HRSDC on EI, each of which emphasized impacts on women. The first one I won't talk about, unless you're interested later. The first one looked at the family supplement which tops up benefits for low-income families with dependent children.
The second evaluation study I worked on addressed El's impact on work/life balance. When we were asked to do this, the anticipation was that we would look at maternity and parental benefits, which clearly relate directly to work/life balance issues, but we chose to focus mainly on regular benefits. The main issue with the regular benefits is the structure of work incentives embedded in the program. In that study we noted that the EI rules reward work patterns that can be shown to be associated with increased stress and work/life balance difficulties, such as long hours and multiple job holding. The rules encourage the more work, the better, the packaging of jobs to get up to the hours you need, and so on. Whether it's the long hours of the male or the female spouse, those are problematic for families.
Work patterns that might be helpful with work/life balance, such as working part-time, are not well protected by EI, nor is any support provided for the work/life balance stresses parents face beyond that first year of parenting. Of course, we found the stresses with slightly older children to be very great. It is not just the first year that is an issue.
The third HRSDC study I worked on focused on EI and seasonal workers. I have done a lot of research with workers in resource-dependent rural communities, particularly in Atlantic Canada. So among the group of precarious workers that Ernie mentioned, I'm particularly interested in seasonal workers. Many seasonal workers actually benefited from the EI switch to hours, as they often work long hours for short periods; however, women did less well under that system. In seasonal industries, women are more likely to work fewer hours and are more likely to have fluctuating earnings, jeopardizing their eligibility and benefit rates compared to men.
The benefit formula with the minimum divisor makes it especially difficult in seasonal industries. It makes it difficult for employers who can't fill jobs unless they can offer 14 steady weeks of work, and it lowered the benefits workers received.
Some of these issues have been addressed, particularly with the pilot project that will calculate benefits based on the best 14 weeks of earnings, but that's only in certain high-unemployment regions.
The re-entrant rules make it almost impossible for a seasonal worker to qualify again for EI if they have a bad year or miss a year, whether that's for caregiving or because of something that happens in the industry. So there's a great incentive to stay on this EI work treadmill.
The final study that I did recently related to EI reviewed the changes that have been made since 1996, in terms of how well they serve women and whether the gender concerns that have been identified since the beginning have been addressed. In that research, I looked at both regular EI and the caregiving benefits under special benefits: maternity, parental, and the compassionate care benefit.
In general EI as a whole reinforces women's responsibility for caregiving. Women's entitlements are still primarily based on their caregiving role. If you look at overall EI, women are now getting as much, or more, of those dollars than men, but it's all entirely due to the special benefits, while their share of regular benefits and the percentage of unemployed women who receive regular benefits have declined.
The changes made during that ten years do not respond to the gender-related complaints that have been raised over ten years.
One other point from that study is that the program parameters for the caregiving benefits reinforce women taking the leaves rather than men. The low-income replacement rates, for example, reinforce the lower earner taking the leave. So the parameters of the existing parental maternity benefits are not doing a good job of sharing the caregiving workload. And on the regular benefits side, the program is not facilitating women being equal labour market participants.
I think I have a couple of minutes, so I'm going to—