Thank you.
I'm pleased to be here today as you launch your study on the economic security of women and their equal participation in the economy. This study is relevant and timely. Significant momentum to address gender disparities has been created, from achieving gender parity in federal cabinet to the commitment to include gender-based analysis in federal budgets, starting in 2017.
This study will help drive forward our shared goal to achieve equality for women, particularly for the most vulnerable, including indigenous women, visible minorities, persons with disabilities, and youth. While there has been progress, there is still much more to do.
The Canadian gender pay gap is the eighth largest among OECD countries. According to the most recent data available, the average earnings for women in all full-time jobs were 73.7% of men's earnings in 2014, suggesting a gap of just over 26%. For all tenures—full-time and part-time—women earn 68.4% of what men earn, a wage gap of 32%.
Two-thirds of part-time workers are women, concentrated in sectors that are traditionally lower paying, such as teaching, nursing, sales, and service industries. Women face barriers to achieving full economic equality in Canada, including systemic discrimination or bias and also social roles and norms such as being primary caregivers.
When a diversity lens is applied to the economic situation for women in Canada, it becomes more clear that some groups of women are more significantly disadvantaged than others. For example, 13.3% of women live in poverty, but the rate of poverty for indigenous women and single mothers is three times that.
Even for those groups of women who have made advances, barriers remain. For example, women represent roughly 61% of post-secondary graduates in Canada. In some male-dominated sectors, such as science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, STEM, the numbers are improving. In 2011, women aged 24 to 34 represented 39% of graduates in STEM. But in 2015, only 22% of workers in STEM fields were women, suggesting that barriers exist not only in the school-to-job transition but in retention of women in these fields.
In other areas, women collectively have made little progress. For example, from 1997 to 2013, the percentage of Canadian workers earning the minimum wage who were women remained stable at 59%.
Achieving equality for all groups of women requires a collaborative effort across the federal government, but also with provincial and territorial governments. Employers and society also play a significant role. Consider, for example, the gender wage gap. Reducing the wage gap requires looking at caregiving, which overall remains a gendered role most often performed by women. Addressing this challenge requires joint efforts between governments and employers, such as enabling more equal take-up of parental leave; increasing flexibility in the workplace, such as for scheduling and leave; and creating more family-friendly workplace policies for men and women.
In terms of the federal role, a range of initiatives is under way that seeks to address some of the common issues that women face in maintaining labour market attachment. You'll hear more about these when my colleagues from other departments come to committee. Some examples are more flexible work arrangements under the Canada Labour Code, changes to employment insurance and parental benefits, and the development of a framework for early learning and child care.
Status of Women Canada acts as a centre of excellence on gender issues, as you're very aware at this time of the year. We develop training tools for gender-based analysis plus. We create networks, promote information sharing, and provide advice, expertise, and guidance to departments on GBA+ implementation. We work with departments responsible for addressing employment and economic issues, both to build their capacity in GBA+ and also on specific strategic proposals.
The agency also engages in targeted actions that support the Government of Canada's efforts. For example, the agency promoted economic security for women by funding a cluster of projects in rural and remote areas through our women's program. These projects broke down silos, leading to more collaborative approaches to program and service delivery, and improved access for women to employment in these areas.
We have also launched a call for proposals to empower indigenous women to create stronger communities, in particular to address issues affecting them or hindering their advancement in all aspects of life. The agency has also funded economic prosperity projects to increase the participation of women in key sectors of the economy, as well as in leadership roles in such diverse domains as the mining and construction sectors.
In addition to our targeted actions that complement the mandate of other departments, the agency also supports improved access to data. Strong and reliable disaggregated data is the foundation of good policy and programming.
For over 25 years, Status of Women has contributed funding for Women in Canada, the pre-eminent and comprehensive statistical portrait of women in Canada. The seventh edition of Women in Canada contains 14 chapters, including on women's economic well-being, education, women with disabilities, labour force participation, and indigenous women.
Budget 2016 also allocated new resources to the agency for a dedicated research and analysis unit. These new funds will allow us to lay the groundwork for future collaboration with Statistics Canada to address current data gaps. This would support a broad range of data needed to advance future policy and program development in both the public and private sectors.
The forum of federal-provincial-territorial ministers responsible for the Status of Women is working to identify actions that can be taken to address the gender wage gap, including through data collection.
Going forward, to address women's economic security and their equal participation in the economy, it will be imperative to continue to encourage and engage leadership across governments; create and support interdepartmental and inter-jurisdictional networks to facilitate, among other things, the collection of shared and disaggregated data and indicators; and encourage collaborative partnerships between levels of government, non-governmental organizations, institutions, and employers.
This committee's work will help inform and strengthen future work of Status of Women and our other colleagues in other departments. We very much look forward to this study and to the final report of this committee.
