Thank you very much for inviting me to this session.
I believe I've been invited on the basis of some history I've had over the years in working with gender statistics in collaboration with StatsCan and with women's organizations. In particular, I have done a lot of work on unpaid work.
I'm not a statistician; I am one of those users. My interest in data, like others', is in how it can support policy in the public interest.
I want to focus on the historical perspective. It will be a bit different from but complementary to the approach of others. I think it's important to the present discussion to situate this in a longer-term, bigger picture.
Significant societal change, like greater equality for women, does not happen overnight. There was mention at your Tuesday session of UN agreements, for example. These are developed over many years as new knowledge is gathered and experience is gained in different parts of the world.
Unpaid work was not on the radar screen when the United Nations' Commission on the Status of Women was created in the late 1940s. The work of many people inside and outside governments put it there, and the impetus came primarily from the women's movement.
Why does this matter? I'd like to highlight four main reasons.
First, it matters because what counts as unpaid work for public policy purposes and the reason it is important is still not very well understood publicly, and the tasks that characterize most of women's work are still too often either sentimentalized or derogated in male-dominated society. So asking questions about something like this requires great care. I know that great care went into designing the general social survey on time use and the census questions on unpaid work. I was part of the consultation when those questions were being designed. When issues are as important as this, you have to keep at them for the longer term, and expecting high use of such data in the short term is probably unrealistic.
We talked about the fact that people are using this data. That's true, but I think it's important to look at this issue of users.
The second reason it matters is that, as is too often the case, the users or potential users who have the most need of data and analysis often have the most difficulty using it. In the case of unpaid work in particular, the overworked women who are struggling most to get to their undervalued paid jobs, raise their children, care for an aging parent, and so on, need the policy support. They're not the ones who are going to be able to do the research, and yet without the research and data, it's hard for them to get policy-makers to pay attention to their issues. This is a real challenge.
In my current job I'm using census data on unpaid work for a new report related to poverty, but I discovered, even in my own world, that to get the full detail I wanted was beyond my resources. I'm sure I'm not alone.
My third point is this. I read in the transcripts from Tuesday something in the discussion in French that really struck me, which I don't think comes across the same way in English, and that's the use of the term travail invisible. It's this issue of invisibility that I think relates strongly to the census. One can see the value of having census questions about unpaid work that make many people think about it—far more than you would get in the limited sample size.
So you make people think about it. You make people stop and recognize how much work they do. Maybe they talk to other people, who didn't get the long-form census, and the conversation expands. This has tremendous value in making this work visible—legitimate, if you will—and thus valuable.
The final reason I think the longer-term view matters is that within the past few years, especially following the world financial crisis and ongoing difficulties in restoring some stability and sustainability, new voices are being heard on unpaid work. This is similar to Kathleen's point.
Joseph Stiglitz, for example, is former head of the World Bank. He's one of a growing number of very influential, mostly male, traditional, market-oriented economists who are changing their view. They're now developing a strong appreciation for the importance of non-market work, what we refer to as unpaid work, and as unpaid work becomes a more important topic of wider public debate, it's even more important for Canada to have good information to be in a good position on this issue.
In closing, I was going to say a few more things that I don't need to say about the value of the census in terms of all the different factors that you can relate, the almost infinite possibilities for analysis. I want to talk just a tiny bit, though, about the work that I was involved in.