On the question of paid and unpaid work, it's not the valuation of the unpaid work that matters. There are some ways in which that figure is used but not in the context I am talking about, that being the structural barriers to women's paid work and their involvement in non-traditional work.
The problem is that there are only 24 hours in a day. I do believe that women and many men have worked hard to overcome that very concrete chronological barrier. Certainly I have wished for a duplicate 24 hours to run alongside my initial allotment.
Time-use budgets demonstrate very clearly, however, that when it comes to the unpaid work in family or family unit that has a disabled elderly person or child or other person needing some sort of care located, that work will be assigned to women. That's where the imbalance comes in.
There are certain irreducible minimums that Canadians expect human beings to meet in their relationships with each other, and the overwhelming burden falls on women's shoulders. Women, we could say, have to duke it out with their partners to make them assume that work. It has not been working out too well lately. There are numerous studies and reports on this by Statistics Canada and others, which I can provide to the chair if needed.
As to the question of how there could be discriminatory results in terms of debt or earnings or both, I think the easiest way for you to get a good overview of that would be to take a look at Maclean's magazine of March 8, 2010, and an article by Hans Rollman, where he outlines three or four publications by Status of Women Canada, some academic journals, as well as Statistics Canada demonstrating why economic discrimination against women begins at age 16. That's clearly statistically identified.
So as young women attempt to contribute to their own education, they already must deal with having less economic power than young men. I can't say why, and maybe it's just a Queen's thing, but I have seen that young men will often get higher levels of funding from their families, and young women will feel they have to go out and borrow more and take out insane lines of credit and credit cards with really high interest rates and other things. So the effects are compounded as every year goes by, and in four or five years, it's not hard to get to that 30% gap.