Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here in front of you today. I hope I can provide you with a very interesting overview of the labour market situation for women in Canada.
I will start off with the unemployment rate. We know, of course, the statistics that most of us are comfortable with. We hear about them quite a bit.
You can see, on the first graph in the presentation, the trend in unemployment going way back to 1976 for both men and women. The red line is the unemployment rate for women. You can see that for most of the last 20 years or so unemployment rates among women have been lower than they have been among men. It used to be, back in the 1970s and 1980s, that the unemployment rate was higher for women than for men, but during the 1990s recession, that switched. We now have an unemployment rate among women of 6.2%. That's the number for January 2009. The rate for men is 8%.
I'm going to talk a little later in the presentation about the current economic context we're in and the fact that unemployment is rising. I'll give you a flavour of that right now.
Over the last three months, we've seen an increase in unemployment. The increase in unemployment among women has been five-tenths of a percentage point. The unemployment rate has gone up from 5.7% in October 2008, just before the current economic problems began, to 6.2% now. It's gone from 6.8% to 8.0% for men. So there has been a bigger increase in the unemployment rate among men recently. We'll get into that a little later in more detail.
The next slide shows the employment rate. This is the share of the population that is employed. They have jobs or are self-employed. You can see that this, again, is the long-term trend. It goes way back to 1976. You can see the upward trend among women in their employment rates and a narrowing of the gap between men and women in their employment rates. Still, the employment rate for women is lower than it is for men. It's at 58.7% compared to 66.6% for men. Those are the latest numbers for January 2009.
The next slide shows how we're doing in an international context. The employment rate progression among women over time has left us now with one of the highest employment rates for women among all OECD countries. You can see, in fact, that only some Scandinavian countries--Norway, Denmark, and Sweden--and Switzerland have higher rates of employment for women than Canada does. You can see that the OECD average is well down the list and that there are many countries where employment rates among women are very low. In particular, as you can see on this graph, in Italy and Mexico employment rates among women are at their lowest.
You may notice that the numbers on this chart differ slightly from the previous chart. It's because the chart I showed you--the one that shows the employment rate over time--is for all women aged 15 and older. The OECD publishes this data for women aged 15 to 64. That's the reason there's a difference in the numbers.
You wanted to know a little bit about the patterns of employment among women as they compare to men. The next graph gives you a little overview of the situation we had in 2008.
Women are more likely to be working part-time. In fact, they are much more likely to be working part-time. We see that 26% of their employment is part-time as opposed to 11% of employment among men. Women, when they are working part-time, are more likely to be doing it for non-economic reasons--voluntary reasons, as it's labelled in the statistics--and 78.4% of female part-timers are working part-time for voluntary reasons as opposed to 75.4% of men.
Women are more likely to be working in temporary jobs, with 12.7% of female employees in temporary jobs as opposed to permanent positions. That compares to 11% for men.
Women are more likely to be working in sales, service, health care, finance, and administration. That probably doesn't surprise anybody. They're less likely to be working in trades, in management positions, or natural resource occupations like farming. Those tend to be rather sticky over time—women have made some moves into what you might term male-dominated occupations, at least traditionally, but there isn't a great progression into those areas. The flip side is true as well, where there are more men who are working in occupations like nursing, for example, which is predominantly a women's occupation, but that progression isn't significant enough to make a big shift in the distribution of occupations over time.
Women are less likely to be self-employed. Eleven percent of women who are employed are self-employed, versus 19% of men. For both men and women, the biggest category of the self-employed is the unincorporated self-employed who have no employees. So you have a business of your own and you are self-employed, but it's not registered, it's not incorporated like that, and you don't have employees. That's the biggest category for both men and women. When you look at the share of the self-employed, women represent a much greater share of the self-employed who are in that category. Among men, there's a bigger share who are in more formal business arrangements, incorporated and with employees. This has an impact on their earnings, and we can talk about that in a slide later.
Of course, there's much more I can say about the nature of employment among men and women, and maybe this will come out in the questions.
The next graph shows us the occupations men and women work in. This is some data to show you what I just mentioned, actually, so maybe we can skip over that given the tight timeline we're under. You can see in this graph that, as I said earlier, women are more likely to be working in sales and service occupations, health care, and those sorts of occupational groupings.
The next slide talks about earnings. These are census data from 2006, and these are estimates of earnings for people who are working all year long and full-time. Women make about 77% of what men make, according to the census. That means about $35,000, almost $36,000 per year, as opposed to men, who make almost $47,000 per year on average. What we see in this graph is the ratio of female earnings to male earnings, and you can see it's about 77% with all occupations, as I said.
The rest of these occupations are the top 10, the biggest occupations we've got in the country. The largest occupation in the country for both sexes is truck driver, for example, and that falls under the category of motor vehicle and transit drivers. So we've got the top 10 right here, and you can get an idea of the earnings ratios between men and women. It's not the same for every occupation. That's the point of this graph. It differs from one occupation to the next.
You wanted to know something about social assistance application among men and women. Unfortunately, because of the time, we weren't able to pull a lot of that information. It's rather deep in our databases. We can say more than what's presented here, but this is what we can present today.
This shows the number of families where there's at least one individual receiving social assistance, by the family type or the household type. You can see, for example, that there are about 300,000 lone-parent families where there's some social assistance received in that household. Not all these lone-parent families are headed by women, but we know most of them are, right? The overwhelming majority of them are. So you can get a sense of social assistance receipt among women as it compares to men by looking at this graph, but it's not complete; I recognize that.
In the next one, the blue line shows the number of couples—that's the middle line—where there's some social assistance receipt. That's about 350,000. There's at least one woman there, right? I'm trying to give you a flavour for social assistance receipt among women. If required, if you want, we can provide you with more information than what's here.
Let's move on to employment insurance, because I understand that's the nature of your study.
These are data here for 2008. The latest December numbers were published a week ago by us at Statistics Canada. You can see on this graph that it shows the share of all EI recipients who are women and how that differs across the provinces.
In 2008, on average for the country, women made up 39.6% of all EI beneficiaries. I mean regular EI, by the way, not including parental maternity leave, special benefits. That means that in 2008 there were 192,000 women on average per month who were on employment insurance. There were 293,000 men.
These are important numbers. So 39.6% of EI recipients are women, but 43.4% of all unemployed are women. So there's a smaller share of EI recipients who are women than there are total unemployed people in the country who are women. There's a difference between employment insurance and the count that we have of unemployed people. In fact, the total number of unemployed is much greater than the number of people who are on EI.
What are some of the reasons for this?
We run a survey called the employment insurance coverage survey. The next graph shows some data from that survey. This looks at men versus women and what share of the unemployed are potentially eligible for EI. There are reasons that you're not going to be eligible for EI if you're unemployed. If you've never worked, for example, or if you haven't worked in the last year or there are other reasons that you haven't contributed to the program, you're not going to be eligible. It shows that less than half of all women who are unemployed are potentially eligible for EI, according to that survey source. That's lower than it is among men. For men, I don't have the exact number, but it's somewhere around 57% of unemployed men are potentially eligible for EI.
Why is there a difference between the men and the women? Well, more unemployed women have no recent work experience, and that seems to be the number one reason that there are fewer who are potentially eligible. For example, a woman having spent some time at home taking care of the children or going to school may have been out of the labour market for a long period of time. That's more likely to happen among women than it is among men.
I'll flip to the next chart. I wanted to talk a bit about the current economic conditions. We all hear about the fact that employment is decreasing and unemployment is rising. This shows in the blue and the green the drop in employment among men and women in the last two recessions, and the yellow is what has happened to us in the last four months, among men and among women. So the yellow is incomplete. This is not the end of the recession; we're just at the start of something here. But you can see that in the past two recessions the impact on men in terms of the overall drop in employment and the percentage decline in employment was greater than that among women. It's because the men tend to work in more cyclical industries like manufacturing and construction.
