I just finished writing a paper on women and poverty and the recession that looks at the roots of women's poverty. There a whole bunch of them: women's wages are lower, there's no child care, their access to training is lower, the welfare rates are too low, women who are single parents have the highest poverty rate of any group in society, and so on. Even though women have gone into the labour force in much greater numbers, as I said earlier, the kinds of jobs they're getting are not going to provide them with stable long-term financial security, so the fact that women are out there working and in many cases doing really well--women are much better educated now than they were, and in many cases better educated than men--is not spelling out in terms of better salaries and better financial futures. That's why I think it's so important for the work that you're doing to look at how you provide financial security for them in the future.
On November 19th, 2009. See this statement in context.