I think the issue of the structural and systemic discrimination that women face in their role in reproduction is something that's being dealt with the entire world wide. Certainly in my experience the fact that working women have children is one of the major pieces of discrimination that they face. Actually, the women doctors who start off almost immediately have troubles if they decide to have children.
That's a whole other piece, and it's a piece that's actually addressed by employment equity laws that deal with trying to figure out how women and how employers can address the needs for women. I would say it is a societal choice that we have children and families.
But that is separate and apart from the issue we face today, and that's the reason why this choice issue should not become mixed up in the issue of equal pay for work of equal value. Equal pay for work of equal value has nothing to do with the choice of whether a woman got this job or that job. What it's about is saying that it's the work women have—the work they're in, the job they have: you evaluate that job. The issue is that there's research that shows that the fact that women are associated with types of work has historically undervalued that work.
So the technique of equal pay for work of equal value is using a mechanism of skill, effort, responsibility, and working conditions—the normal things employers use to value work. Job evaluation was actually an employer tool. Use that tool and compare that work—the work a woman is doing, not the work she might have gotten, should have gotten, or whatever, but the work she's in—and see whether it's comparable to other, male work in the workplace. And if it is comparable, what's the difference in pay?
It's a pretty specific technique, and the tool is to identify that discrimination where comparably valued work is paid less. It's considered that it's paid less because you've done this analysis: you've sorted out that the work is equal and employers are paying them less.
We know that historically, if employers aren't required to address the gap, they don't. Not only that, they actually don't do the analysis. When you have a proactive pay equity law, it isn't that the union doesn't sit down with the employer, as Ms. Gagné was mentioning. They do. I've been involved in these things for 20 years. You sit down—the union is there, the employer is there—you analyze the jobs, you see if there's a gap, and then the law says you have to close it.