When this issue first came up and when I looked at and read the new household survey, I was certainly struck by the fact that those particular questions on unpaid work had been excised from the household survey.
It brought to mind the real fight there had been in the women's movement back in the 1960s and 1970s--and indeed stretching back to the time when Charlotte Whitton was president of CCSD, back in the 1920s--around the number of women engaged in trying to elevate the importance of unpaid work. Those groups ranged across the ideological spectrum. They were people who were concerned about the labour market, but concerned also about unpaid caring work that women were doing. Certainly the fight for the inclusion of these questions in the census had everything to do with understanding women's equality and making the case that women who were labouring in the home were doing incredibly important caregiving work that was not being captured in our formal economic accounts. We can document that history with the national accounts and the work of Marilyn Waring in If Women Counted.
How quietly this happened. This one set of questions, without consultation, was excised from the 2011 census. I have been struck by the silence, because it really does strike profoundly at questions of women's equality.
While there are now new data collection instruments and surveys, such as the GSS, that look at care and elder care and child care, they don't facilitate the ability to do the kind of far-reaching analysis around gender equality that Leroy and Doug were talking about that you are able to do with the census.
You're absolutely correct that this has been quite striking, and the silence has been profound.