Status of Women Committee on Feb. 7th, 2017

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

Excellent.

That's our time, panel. We thank all of you for your excellent contributions today.

We will get ready to start with the next panel.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

We'll get started with our second panel.

We have with us, from the Women's Economic Council, Rosalind Lockyer, the co-manager, and Valerie Carruthers.

The other witnesses, I think, are just coming in the door now, so I will start with the Women's Economic Council and then introduce the other witnesses as they're seated.

You have eight minutes. Please go ahead.

[Valerie Carruthers, Co-Manager, Virtual Office, Newfoundland and Labrador, Women's Economic Council]

Hi. My name is Valerie Carruthers. I'm with the Women's Economic Council. I'm here with my colleague Rosalind Lockyer.

I'd like to thank you for your time today.

My focus is going to be on EI reform. I've worked with women to sustain them to transition to employment for the last 12 years. I feel that I have something to add.

The first thing I want to talk about is EI eligibility, particularly around the non-standard work that women participate in, the part-time employment in which they form the majority. In terms of who benefits from the EI system, only 34% of women will be able to benefit. What's really difficult when you're on the ground delivering programming is that if they're not EI eligible, there's a whole host of other programs that women cannot access. It's not just about not getting the EI benefits, but it's more importantly the funded post-secondary education and training.

There are an awful lot of people who want to work. They don't have the opportunity to fund their own education or training. Some of these women are from difficult situations. In fact, at the provincial level, at the community agency level, we have to design programs that specifically include a paid employment component of our intervention just to get them EI eligible, so they can access some of these benefits for training. We have to use community resources, provincial resources, just to get them into an EI eligible status to access funded training or education, which is a shame.

I was looking up research, because quite often when we're on the ground, we don't look at the big picture. It looked at money invested in 2015-16. It mentions here that $3.6 billion was spent towards these labour market policies. In 2016-17, this was increased by an additional $125 million. This is to help EI-eligible claimants in Canada gain training and work skills, which includes funded college programs. If you only have 34% of women who can benefit because they qualify for EI, then you're leaving out the majority of women from those opportunities. That's a real shame, and I see that.

The other thing I want you to know, and it's probably been mentioned here before, is that these same women also can't qualify for special benefits when they have children. They're left out, and I have to look for alternate ways for doing that.

I guess the final thing I want to talk about is the apprehension and the fear of people who are attached to an EI system. It can also be a provincial income support system. There's a lot of fear that in choosing work, even when work is available, even when they can do the work, there will be negative impacts to not only their current benefits but also to their future potential access.

I see people go from provincial to federal systems, back to the provincial system, and a choice of work actually puts them further behind. There needs to be more coordination at the federal-provincial level, so that when you make a choice of work, even if it's outside the standard paid employment model, you are not penalized and you can actually be better off by making that choice of work.

I'm going to turn it over now to my colleague Ros.

[Rosalind Lockyer, Co-Manager, Administrative Office, Women's Economic Council]

I'm going to take a different focus. I've spent most of my adult life working with women who are very diverse and very vulnerable and trying to move them from that position through what I call a tool, the tool being self-employment. I work a lot in northern Ontario. That's where my paid job is, all across northern Ontario, where the diversity is huge and the geographic distance is huge. That's where I'm speaking from.

I want to commend this government for initiating their national framework on early learning and child care and their promise to do further investment of $2.6 billion up to 2019-20. That's very encouraging, but I want to reiterate what Valerie was saying, which is to not leave out the huge percentage of women who don't fit the general criteria for this kind of child care. When we're looking at this national framework, don't forget to include self-employed women. A lot of them are choosing self-employment now because of the precarious employment situation. Self-employment is part of that, and these women need high-quality, flexible, and affordable child care.

I want to zero in on the first nations women, the indigenous women, because 51% of aboriginal independent businesses are either owned or partly owned by women. They're a driver of jobs and opportunities in indigenous communities, so we have to look at where they're situated.

The reality of their lives is that they lack this kind of high-quality child care, but in the indigenous community, elder care also is a very big priority for indigenous women. If they don't have this support, they're not going to be able to move ahead in their businesses in the way that they need to. When we're looking across Canada now and at that huge potential, if we ignore it, it's just not going to happen. That's really important.

In fact, with the changing job market we have now, some of the reports are saying that as technology takes over, women are going to be the most vulnerable because of their kinds of jobs. Now if you go into McDonald's to order your hamburger, you see technology is going to take away a job, generally from a woman. In our social supports for women, which are really important, we must look at this segment of the population, and that includes self-employment.

I want to spend another brief minute talking about women entrepreneurs and innovation, because the trend now is to support businesses through the innovative incubators, the innovation centres and so on, and the mainstream business development centres. The trend is to support businesses that are from younger people, leaving out a lot of women. These are businesses in innovation, technology, and STEM. Women don't fit. These incubators are not inclusive to women, and that's going to cause a major gap in how women move forward in our economy as entrepreneurs.

I'll leave it at that and open it to questions.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

That's very good.

I'm pleased also to have with us today Women in Capital Markets. We have Jennifer Reynolds, the president and CEO. We also have, from the Canadian Research Institute for the Advancement of Women, Jacqueline Neapole and Jane Stinson.

We'll go first to you, Ms. Reynolds. You have seven minutes.

[Jennifer Reynolds, President and Chief Executive Officer, Women in Capital Markets]

Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here.

I'm going to focus on women and leadership—that's where my expertise lies—or more specifically, the lack thereof. I have a few slides that I've put together, but first I'll just give you some context around the numbers.

If you compare us globally to OECD countries, the numbers in Canada are not good. Representation on boards today is about 12% for publicly listed companies, TSX companies. If you have the graph in front of you, you'll see that at the bottom of the graph.

You're looking at other countries that are 30% to 40%. Some of those countries have gone the route of quotas. We have not chosen that. We've chosen “comply or explain”.

They also started a lot earlier. Other countries focused on the issue of why we don't have more women in leadership a lot sooner than we did in Canada. We put the regulation into place a couple of years ago.

In the U.K., comply or explain actually worked. They've gone from 12% representation on boards in 2012 to 26% today. It can work, but we haven't seen a lot of progress. In Canada today, 45% of boards have zero women on them; another 30% have one. The executive suite looks pretty much the same. If you asked those boards why they don't have any women or how they appoint, they would say, “We appoint based on meritocracy”, which obviously implies that 45% of boards decided that they couldn't find one woman who merited a board seat.

We all know that this is just a red herring. It's ridiculous. There are plenty of very qualified women for boards in this country. If anyone needs a recommendation, they can come to me. That's not the issue. It's a demand issue. That's how we need to address it in this country, and recognize that there are lots of very qualified women.

If you look at the progress since comply or explain, it's gone up 1%. We were at 11% last year; it's 12% this year. That's just not good enough. Of the 521 seats that came up last year, only 15% were filled by women, so we're not seeing corporate Canada paying any attention to comply or explain in any broad sense.

I know Bill C-25 is coming forward, and it will mimic the same sort of disclosure that we require of publicly listed companies. Bigger companies are taking this more seriously, but they have been for a long time. They've always had better disclosure. They've always focused on these things.

Canada is an economy of smaller companies. That's the reality. We need this to be broadly taken up by companies in Canada. Often you'll get the excuse, “Well, we're a resource-heavy economy, and therefore we can't because there are no women in resources.” In Australia, they managed to go from 8% on boards in 2008 to about 23% today, so other countries that are resource-heavy economies are also making progress. We certainly can in Canada as well.

Here are a couple more quick statistics on the whole board issue.

Part of the issue is that you need to have policies: do you care? Are you looking at it? Only 21% have any sort of policy around gender diversity.

The second thing is that you have to have targets. Any business in Canada has targets around its objectives. For people in Canada and the corporate world, if you say “targets”, it computes in their heads immediately as “quotas”. It's not a quota. It's a target. We always put metrics around things, and companies need to do this. We need to start thinking about that. It's not good enough for companies to just say, “We don't have a policy. We don't have targets.” We need to ask more of Canadian corporations.

The key issue here is, why should you care? Obviously, there is a social justice element here, but there is a business case. Much research has been done. I'm sure people around this table have read it, so I won't go over it all. Canada needs to care because our economy will be stronger. Our businesses will be stronger.

We're leaving half the talent pool sitting around. Women have been over 50% of the university graduates for 25 years now, and today it's 62%. We earn 50% of master's degrees, and Ph.D.s now too. All that talent is just going away. We're close to 50% of the workforce and about 35% of middle management, and have been for a couple of decades—in the U.S., women are 50% of middle management—and yet, if you look at senior officer roles, you see 18%. The numbers aren't budging. They haven't moved in a long time. We need to make sure that those numbers start moving, because that talent is just wasting away at the mid-level.

There are different ways you can get at this problem. I think too often we decide that it's the baby issue. That's what I hear from senior leaders all the time: it's just the babies. Absolutely, that's an element of the problem, but it's not just about the babies. There are all kinds of structural barriers in the corporate world today that make it difficult for women to advance.

Thankfully, I'm in an industry that, if you look at the broader financial sector, is looking at this problem very carefully. They've done some good work. A couple of the financial institutions now are at about 40% in terms of the representation of women. You can do it. That's my point. It can be done. Companies are doing a better job today and making progress on this, but it takes very formal talent management. I can go into the different types of policies if people are interested in what companies are doing and best practices, but I'll leave that for now, unless there are questions on it.

In particular what we need here is transparency. If you're thinking about what can you do from a public perspective, we need to encourage transparency. This comply-or-explain approach also needs some support behind it.

In the U.K. the reason it was successful is the government put in place a review called the Lord Davies' report every year, and it really was a review on pushing.... First of all, they went around and they got stakeholder engagement from the corporate world broadly—chairmen, senior leaders—and from the public sector to say they needed to focus on this, since it's a business issue. They published their report every year. There was a bit of a shaming game involved there, too. They put the list of people who were doing nothing out there, and you have to do it. I've been told it's un-Canadian to be shaming people like that, but, you know, we need to do it.

It also provided best practices, and it provided that report card every year to say how they were doing. That's why we saw real progress there, I believe, along with a few other entities like the 30% club that were pushing. We need that. The feeling generally in comply or explain is there's a frustration there, so we need more behind it.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

Okay. Very good.

We will go then to the Canadian Research Institute for the Advancement of Women.

Jane, are you going to begin? You have seven minutes.

[Jane Stinson, Research Associate, Canadian Research Institute for the Advancement of Women]

Thanks very much for inviting us to appear on this important topic. CRIAW has a long-standing interest and publication record on this question. I'm here with Jackie Neapole, who is our lone staff person. I'll deliver the remarks, and Jackie will participate in any questions.

We want to focus on a few things. One is the structural economic inequality for women and to recognize it as a structural problem, to see the consequences in terms of women's economic inequality and poverty, to look at the impact it has on women's caring work, and to recognize the importance of public services for women's economic security. We will end with some recommendations.

First it is essential, in our view, to recognize that insecurity for women is a structural issue. It's not just about women's choices, which is often how it gets framed. That means it is deeply rooted in many systems, programs, and policies, much as our colleague was just saying. Those include many things for which the federal government is responsible, including directly as an employer in terms of the practices it has and the example it sets across the country. I mean things like pay systems, hiring systems that may have targets—God forbid—employment systems and what they are like, the EI system, parental leave systems, and the absence of a child care system, among other things. These are the systems that make a difference for women's economic equality and security, or not. It's not just about whether or not we choose to pursue certain jobs.

Women have been entering the workforce for the past 40 years, and things have not changed. We continue to be concentrated in administrative positions, teaching, and service jobs, which are, in our experience, undervalued vertically and horizontally. Either in the sectors in which we're employed or within an organization, women still tend to be paid less, often because of where we are concentrated.

The fact that this situation has persisted for decades indicates that it's structural. We need to get deeper and deal with the underlying reasons and barriers to change. We really disagree with the focus being put on individual women having to make different choices, because that puts the burden on women to solve their own economic insecurity. Instead, those who have much more power to make a difference are governments and employers. The focus should be on things like targets to address hiring or undervaluing of women's work, the need to recognize and value women's paid and unpaid work, and social programs that are needed to support women's participation in the paid labour force and in society generally.

Women clearly have economic inequality and greater poverty in Canada. Throughout our lives we make less money than men do, and this then means we're poorer in our retirement and our older years as well. A gender-based analysis plus, GBA+, which the government has adopted and which CRIAW also calls an intersectional analysis, is very important, because we know that not all women are affected equally. There's an uneven distribution of benefits and costs, and we need to get at those differences.

For example, women living with disabilities are doubly affected. Not only do they experience lower wages generally, but they often can't find work or keep it, and so they are underemployed. Female-led single-parent families do far less well than do male-led single-parent families, and in fact, the UN committee CEDAW has recommended that Canada focus on this persistent problem.

Part of what's at the core is women's caring work. It has a fundamental impact on our economic insecurity, because women still bear the majority of domestic and caring work. It's true that men now spend more time on housework: over 20 years, it's 20 more minutes a day. At that rate, we should have equality in how many years?

Therefore, more has to be done. This conflict is serious for women, because women are often the ones who end up staying home when there's a conflict between care and paid employment. There are many things, but better parental leave provisions—something within the purview of the federal government—would help. Those, in addition to what exists for women, would give men an opportunity to also share in child care at an early age. There is evidence that if men start early, they will have greater participation throughout the child's life.

The importance of public services for women's economic security can't be understated either. They're important not only as a source of good jobs—although that is eroding, and it's a serious concern—but also because so many women rely on public services. We did an investigation in Ottawa, and a group of women identified hundreds of public services as needed in their daily lives. What's happening to the public sector with cuts in public services and with the growing precarity is a serious concern for women's economic security, or insecurity.

In conclusion, women's economic security over the past decade or so has worsened—the data shows it—partly because of this rise in precarious employment, which is also happening in the federal government, and also due to cuts to public services, both federally and in the reduced transfers to provinces and the cuts there.

We have a number of recommendations for action by the federal government.

One is to play a leadership role in establishing greater economic security for women in all aspects of our lives. Another is to promote an understanding of structural inequality. It's not just about women's choices. Identify where cuts and services are having a greater impact on women and on specific groups of women to get at that intersectional or GBA+ understanding.

Start with a rigorous and public GBA analysis of this federal budget. I know it's starting internally, but it should be public as well. Require GBA+ in environmental assessments. Our work in the north shows that this is an opportunity to ensure that women's needs—especially those of local women in the north—are met in the context of resource development, if such a thing were required.

Play a leadership role in creating more affordable, quality, non-profit child care spaces across the country. I think we've all talked about that. Make EI easier to qualify for and add parental benefits. Improve funding for public services. Require StatsCan to start collecting, or make sure they're collecting, data on time spent on domestic work and on gender division within the family. Canada has been a leader in that area, and it's important to keep monitoring. Finally, stem and reverse the trend towards precarity across the federal public sector through your federal collective bargaining.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

Thanks very much.

We're going to begin our first round of questioning with Ms. Ludwig. You have seven minutes.

[Karen Ludwig, Liberal, New Brunswick Southwest, NB]

Thank you all for your presentations.

Ms. Reynolds, on the topic of women in leadership, I recently read an article, and the quote that stuck with me was, “You cannot be if you cannot see.”

How significant is it that young women and young boys see women in positions of leadership?

[Jennifer Reynolds]

It's huge, and we do a lot of work around role models. I talked earlier about how people always assume it's the baby issue, and that's why women opt out of the corporate world. If you're sitting there at the mid-level in a corporation and you see no women ahead of you, you don't think it can be done. All you see are role models that are not as relatable. It's a bit of chicken and egg. We've got to get women into those positions so that they can see those role models.

We do a lot of work around STEM too, which I didn't talk about. It's a similar issue there. We're actually seeing declining numbers in university engineering programs today. I think a big part of the problem there is just not seeing those role models or seeing work environments. We have this problem in capital markets. They think of capital markets as male dominated and really competitive and aggressive and so on, but it's not the 1980s anymore. It's actually a different environment. I think when they see STEM professions generally, they don't have those role models. We do a lot of conferences for young women in high school and universities, trying to provide those role models and bring them in.

You can have a huge impact very quickly. I firmly believe we need to have a closer partnership between the corporate world and both the high school and university educational systems. That link for students is really missing. Most of them don't even know what these jobs are, but it's also seeing those role models and bringing them to young people.

[Karen Ludwig, Liberal, New Brunswick Southwest, NB]

Thank you.

On that, I'll just give my personal example. I'm doing a little bit of work on women in leadership, particularly women in politics in my riding. I am honoured to represent the riding of New Brunswick Southwest as its first female member of parliament. When I look around the riding, we have 14 mayors, of whom three are female. We have eight MLAs, which in Ontario would be the equivalent of an MPP. Of the eight MLAs that touch into my federal riding, there are no females.

If we look at the high school level, we're looking at principals across the riding at all levels of education. Of the 29 principals, 17 are women, so we are making some progress in one area. I would strongly argue, as you would as well, the significance of women being involved in various roles, because all people bring different experiences and different perspectives.

I also sit on the international trade committee, and that's another question I have for you. How important is it that we have women negotiating international trade agreements, particularly when we heard the earlier speaker talk about the differences in the OECD countries? How important is it that we have women's perspectives, with women not only negotiating but sitting on those boards and offering that different perspective? Is there a balance option there?

[Jennifer Reynolds]

Absolutely. I think that in leadership, whether it's political or business, our perspectives are not there as women. They are just not. Having one woman on a board or one woman on a panel just isn't enough. There's research that will tell you that it's at the 30% mark where you get a change in the dynamics around a boardroom table. There's research from many different perspectives. From a governance perspective, you have better governance if you have more women in a boardroom. Women, obviously, are going to have a different perspective on things.

If you think about the fact that 80% to 85% of purchasing decisions are made by women, I think with respect to trade or with respect to a company selling out there, you should want women there. I think it would change the world.

I mentioned there are business cases and research that tell us we'll be more competitive and more profitable and shareholder results will be better if we have more women on boards. I think we'll create a different sort of.... I think it impacts the environment, and not just the environment but everything from what's on the shelves to what your phone looks like to what the environment is like. It's going to change things dramatically if we can get women into those roles.

[Karen Ludwig, Liberal, New Brunswick Southwest, NB]

I agree. I certainly think it would help us be more competitive as a country if we had more diversity on our negotiating boards and in top leadership positions.

My question is to all the panel members. We have heard across all the discussions this morning about structural barriers and unconscious biases. How as the federal government can we better inform the public and make them more aware of the structural barriers and the unconscious biases so we have more opportunities for women to be participating at higher levels within our society?

[Jennifer Reynolds]

I can start on that. Unconscious bias is a very important topic. A lot of the work I was talking about in the financial institutions starts with unconscious bias training, because people need to understand that.

I'm a positive person. I don't like to think there's some big conspiracy out there. A lot of decisions get made on the basis of “same like same”. We gravitate towards people who are like ourselves, we want to promote people like ourselves, and we tend to sponsor and mentor people like ourselves, so when it comes to promotion time, those people do have better experience. They got it all along the way, so that absolutely has to happen.

From a government perspective, I think there's an educational component. I don't think it starts early enough. I actually think a lot of people think it's only old white men who are biased, but that's not true. Women are biased. Young people are biased. People of all cultures are biased. It can be a part of our educational system. We should start thinking about that.

I spent time in universities. It's so dramatically different to go into a university in Canada today and see that diversity and then transport myself to the boardrooms where I spend a lot of my time and where there's no diversity whatsoever. That's a big problem in Canada. How are we going to deal with that when we have immense diversity in our country, yet at the senior leadership level there's none?

[Karen Ludwig, Liberal, New Brunswick Southwest, NB]

And the global markets that we're working in.

[Jennifer Reynolds]

Exactly, and we don't have that experience here in Canada. We need it, and we need to be able to see it in leadership positions, not just in lower-level economic ranges in Canada. I think that piece can be part of our educational system, and should be. Teachers should be thinking about this as well, certainly.

[Karen Ludwig, Liberal, New Brunswick Southwest, NB]

Thank you.

I'm going to give our other panel members a chance.

[Jane Stinson]

I think doing gendered analyses of the need for changes in federal programs would help. That's a great way to raise awareness, if you're introducing a change, to really make it clear what those gendered impacts are and therefore why this needs to change.

I would say also that the federal government could play a great role through advertising campaigns that help as well. I remember that when the Ontario government introduced pay equity legislation, there was a major public advertising campaign that spoke to the value of women's work. There's that sort of thing that can be done as well.

[Valerie Carruthers]

I would like to build on the GBA+, because I feel that whenever there's funding coming from the federal to the provincial government, it's earmarked for a particular thing. GBA can be part of that. Among the criteria for approving community projects when there's a call for a proposal, quite often there's no GBA requirement. It's not part of the criteria for approval. There's a lot of money coming down.

At the provincial level, when I was speaking to one of the members of the staff there, they said they find it really difficult to go it alone if it's not coming from the federal government. The money is coming down for them to manage, but unless the provincial government really institutes the GBA+, they have to go it alone there.

I think there's a role for the federal government at a very pragmatic level so that when you're putting out a call, you look at your criteria, look at your guideline for proposals, and include that in there so that it is a requirement for people to consider.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

I'm sorry, but that's your time.

Ms. Vecchio is next.

[Karen Vecchio, Conservative, Elgin—Middlesex—London, ON]

Hi, and thanks very much. I really did find the information regarding the employment insurance.... I worked as an assistant, and I recognized that there were a lot of women who were unable to get employment insurance because they were working part time over a given year. I know that we have the special benefits after 600 hours, but some people cannot reach that level.

Of course, that goes hand in hand with the social programs of the province, because in order to get to them, you need to be eligible.

What is the fix? How can we be economically and fiscally responsible as a government, yet find the benefits for the participants? Is there a fix or an easy solution?

[Valerie Carruthers]

I don't think there is an easy fix. I really feel that we need to look at how programs can be designed so that they will equally benefit women. When it comes to employment, you can't have public policy, either provincially or federally, such that when you make the choice to work, you will actually be hurt by that choice.

[Karen Vecchio, Conservative, Elgin—Middlesex—London, ON]

Thank you.

The reason I asked that question first was because when we're looking....

Last week we had somebody who talked about the fact that when women were applying for loans for small businesses, there was a huge gap. I'm wondering if it's because some of these programs offer the financial literacy for starting new businesses, and things like that. Do you find that there is a measurable difference between men and women when it comes to business financial literacy?

[Rosalind Lockyer]

I would say that there is a huge difference. I think it's because the programs to grow your business are all focused around innovation and STEM technology. Women don't fit easily in there. They're more around social innovation. When they go to the mainstream incubators to get funding, they find that everything—the investors, the loans mechanism, the grants mechanism—is geared towards this very narrow focus. There is actually a lot of ageism there as well.

Women do have good ideas, but they are not the favoured trend of the day. It could be communication as well—how women communicate, what they're doing in their business. We've talked about this a lot in my world. They don't want to be seen as aggressive, so they're toning down their communication in such a way that they're not being assertive enough in asking for the dollar or explaining why their business is the kind of business that should be supported.

I think there's a big gap there that we can close using the GBA+ evaluation and by following up on funded programs so that we ensure that these programs are inclusive, because they're not now.