I wish I could take credit for it, but I can't.
The assessment of the gender gap report is based on four key factors. There's economic participation and opportunities for women, there's educational attainment, political empowerment, and health and survival. The areas in which Canada has certainly made progress are in economic participation and opportunity, as well as political empowerment. So the moving forward in those two areas has positioned Canada at a higher level.
I think we need to recognize that as a great accomplishment, but at the same time we need to be careful about how much weight we place on that. If things change from one country to another, from one year to the next, we could find ourselves 22nd next year. I guess the key point is, we need to be looking at all of the subfactors and the subindicators in those evaluations to make sure that we always keep a strong focus on all of them, because having gained an achievement doesn't necessarily promise keeping it in the future years. So we need to be looking at all of the areas even if we are doing well.
To come back to your first point on non-traditional occupations for women, I would say it has certainly been a focus of the government and it has been a focus of Status of Women Canada. A lot of the work that is being done is setting the stage, if you want, for some improvements in the coming months as well. We're working with organizations that have a potential long-term impact, like the sector councils at HRSDC, which are working directly with employers. We're finding that one of the key issues of women in non-traditional occupations is not necessarily the ability for women to be doing this work; it's the ability to retain women who have gone through the training or the academic certifications they require. But once they get employed, the environment in the employment milieu is not necessarily the most attractive or the most adapted to women.
A lot of the work we want to concentrate on is helping employers understand how they can retain women in their workforce. We're working with, for example, Joanne Stanley, from CATA WIT, on that, as well as Dr. Orser at the Telfer management school, to try to find areas that we can further explore as a government organization.