Thank you very much for the invitation to speak to you today.
I consider this to be an auspicious beginning to a very important study by this committee, and I feel honoured to have an opportunity to share my own insights in this area with you.
I want to speak, first of all, to the point that there is a strong relationship between women's equality and girls' economic prospects. Just to emphasize how beyond question this connection is, I'd like to refer you to UNICEF's most recent report, which it published in 2010, on its policies relating to women's economic equality and the position and the prospects of both boys and girls. The report states that:
...gender equality among adults, expressed in equal enjoyment of rights and mutually respectful relationships in both the public and private spheres, provides an essential context in which girls and boys can learn the gender-equal attitudes and behaviours that will sustain human development and development goals.
This is a point that has been repeated by every major international organization and by countless studies and governments, and it is beyond question. I emphasize it here because it was articulated in the UNICEF report in the form of a commentary on the application of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, as well as in related international documents in the context of dealing with women's domestic equality.
I also wanted to start with this point because this committee is asking what steps can be taken to secure a prosperous future for girls in Canada. I would like to remind this committee that in fact Canada is the country perhaps best suited to answer that question, because Canada was the very first country to actually achieve high standing on the question of gender equality. Between 1975 and 1995, Canada took all the steps necessary to be ranked, for the second half of the 1990s, number one on the UN's gender-related development index.
Canada has walked this path before, and Canada has in the past catapulted women in Canada to positions of accelerated equality not seen in any country before or since. I also want to emphasize the position or the connection between women's equality and girls' economic prospects, because, unfortunately, since 2000, Canada has lost its world-renowned capacity to deliver women's equality.
Table 1, which is included in the brief I circulated for this hearing, demonstrates that since 2005 the status of women in Canada has fallen rapidly on all global indices and thus no longer provides the policy context, the social and economic context, that is necessary to raise gender-equal girls who can confidently look forward to safe and prosperous futures.
I have provided in table 1 the details of these rankings, because this is a very serious matter, which has been confirmed not only by the United Nations but also by Social Watch, a respected social-equality organization, and by the World Economic Forum, which is essentially concerned with matters economic. It documents that within a short 10-year period, Canada has fallen from number one, at the beginning of the 2000s, to number 18 on the UN index.
Women's equality responds quickly to changes in policies. I've included parallel data for Spain, a country that started out ranked number 21 when Canada was number one. If you follow down the column in table 1, you will see in fact that as Canada has fallen, Spain, simply by using the same policies Canada used between 1976 and 1995-2000, has managed to get itself close to the same position that Canada had achieved after its efforts.
So policies matter, and women's equality is incredibly fragile as well as being incredibly responsive to equality-promoting policies.
I would like to go on to my second point, which is to give you a bit of information about what has so damaged the status of women in Canada in such a short time. With respect to the economic position of women in Canada today, women perform approximately 45% of all paid work that goes on in Canada. This figure has not changed in 30 years, since this calculation has been made. At the same time, women continue to perform 64% of all unpaid work. Do the math. That has women doing more than all the work in the country, year in, year out. These two figures have not changed.
This is in exchange for 36% of total national market incomes. Women work more and get far less than men do. This is a position that has been virtually unchanged for the last 15 to 20 years and accounts for the deteriorating position of women. This has shown up in every facet of the fiscal, educational, social, and other systems in Canada.
I'd like to draw your attention to the data on women's full-time incomes as a percentage of men's, by educational level. It is true that it has been by dint of higher and further education that women in Canada have managed to make the great gains they did. But based on data produced by Statistics Canada in its publication “Women in Canada”, you can see that the gender gap for women with a university degree in Canada in 2000 was bigger than the gender gap for that same level of educational attainment in 1990.
My main recommendation is that this committee charge Status of Women Canada with responsibility for continuing the detailed work needed to track the gender impact of every single policy produced by the federal government.
Thank you.