Status of Women Committee on Feb. 7th, 2017

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

I call the meeting to order.

Good morning, colleagues. Welcome.

We continue with our study of the economic security of women. I want to welcome the Parliamentary Secretary for the Status of Women, Terry Duguid.

Welcome, and we will enjoy the benefit of your wisdom. I see that we have Kevin Waugh in here as well today, so I think we are at gender parity again. I love it.

Today we have as our guest, from the Canadian Women's Foundation, Anuradha Dugal, who is the director of violence prevention programs. We also have Ann Decter from YMCA Canada, who is the director of advocacy and public policy. We are awaiting, by video conference from Paris, France, Willem Adema, who is a senior economist in the social policy division of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, but he hasn't yet joined us, so we'll leave him to the last.

We will begin with comments from Ms. Dugal.

You have seven minutes.

[Anuradha Dugal, Director, Violence Prevention Programs, Canadian Women's Foundation]

Thank you very much.

Thank you, Chair, and honoured members. I'm very excited to be with you today and talk about gender parity in Canada and particularly, as we see around the table, the growing representation of women in positions of leadership. That's a very positive start.

However, I have to admit I'm not bringing all good news. We definitely see in Canada that there is inequality in the gender wage gap, which has not changed. We see a low percentage of women in STEM programs—science, technology, engineering, and mathematics—and in upper management, and we still see evidence of much unconscious bias in the ways that women are treated and the ways in which women experience their lives professionally.

We know that economic inequality stems from systemic and structural barriers, and it persists despite the clear indications that we all benefit from gender equality. The World Economic Forum in particular points to numerous studies that confirm that reducing gender inequality will enhance productivity and economic growth. Women in Canada continue to be economically marginalized, particularly women of colour, aboriginal women, rural and northern women, women who identify as LGBTQ, older women, immigrant women, women with disabilities, and young women. Just as an example, aboriginal women are twice as likely to be living in poverty as women who are non-aboriginal.

Also, we know that there is an intersection with violence. Women are more likely than men to experience violence in their own intimate partner relationships, and this increases their vulnerability to poverty, in part because it typically leads to one partner who can't work. Most often this is the woman, as she's trying to move away from an abusive home. Single-parent-led families experience the highest levels of poverty, and most single-parent families are women led.

Many women, particularly those in intergenerational poverty or who are less educated, take multiple part-time low-wage jobs in order to successfully continue with their responsibilities, often as homemakers or in child care, elder care, or taking care of other members of the family. Therefore, they are often in the informal sector, which leads to a lack of protections, rights, and traditional social supports and benefits that could otherwise protect them. In our publication Beyond Survival, published in 2010, we reported that in Canada non-standard work now accounts for almost two in five workers. Forty per cent of women in the Canadian economy are engaged in non-standard work. About one-quarter of working women work part time, and they make up 70% of Canada's total part-time labour force. About a quarter of these can't find full-time work, and the rest are probably choosing part-time work to fulfill the responsibilities we mentioned earlier.

However, women are now better educated than men, have nearly as much work experience, and are equally likely to pursue many high-paying careers, so we have to look at the reasons that women, once they secure stable employment with benefits and job security, might also be disadvantaged by sexist institutional structures and fields and professions that might be dominated by men versus fields and professions that are dominated by women, which very often are the lowest-paying fields in our economic sector—not-for-profit work, the social service sector, and administrative work. As well, we still see that women are less likely to be promoted.

We fund programs in economic development. We focus on social purpose enterprise, STEM, trades and technology, and accelerating entrepreneurship for women. This is what the women told us before they entered the programs. They said 60% of them....

We're talking about wraparound processes. It's not enough to provide women with economic security through an employment course; they need much more than that. They told us, going into the program, that they need housing and social support to set up their home even before they can start thinking about their job security. Thirty per cent needed legal access to deal with family law issues, very often related to divorce or child custody or social assistance problems, and 10% needed emergency funds to deal with last-minute problems. We've also supported emergency loan funds across Canada. Some of them buy winter tires for their cars so they can get to work, which they don't otherwise have the backup funds to do. Some of them are buying computers so that they can get to work. Some of them are paying for courses at colleges to upgrade their skills.

Our research tells us that women's economic choices are shaped by the broader socio-economic and political context. They need supports to transition from social assistance to employment. They need to build new skills. They want to secure full-time work with a livable wage. They want out of poverty.

We've been funding programs. We do training with 100 different organizations that do community economic development across Canada. They point to an urgent need for training and retraining for women, and an investment in their employment skills that would change where they work.

It's not simply a matter of pre-employability skills but of bridging skills that will take them into further employment. It's also a matter of the training and expertise of those in the sector who are training the women. We are looking at training for women who are underemployed or unemployed, and also training for the sector that is working with those women.

There's an assumption that community economic development can be gender neutral, and we think this ignores the role that gender continues to play in shaping the lives of women, not only for the individual programs but for the entire sector. In order to really talk about women's economic self-sufficiency and enable them to make positive changes, we need to address those wraparound supports.

We offer a program that builds their assets. It focuses on long-term support. It focuses on wraparound services. It is customized for each woman, and it provides just-in-time supports, including such things as mentors, coaches, bridging programs, and, as I've mentioned, other kinds of community referrals.

As an example, for women who went through this program, by the end we were able to report that they were 83% more employable. Those who gained access to a mentor accounted for 81%, and 65% learned to navigate bureaucracies, which we know is also a big part of having to work one's way to success.

In financial assets they also gained. Those who launched a small business accounted for 65%. Those who had higher incomes accounted for 51%, and 44% increased their financial literacy, which we know is an additional need for women as they transition to economic security.

In closing, I'm going to mention four policy ideas. I have a lot more to say about them, but I'll just mention them as high points. Obviously, broadening unemployment insurance needs to be addressed. We need affordable housing for women, particularly women who are transitioning away from violence. I can't not say child care. I'll say it again: child care, and child care. We need an acceptable, adaptable, efficient child care program across Canada, and we need pay equity legislation across Canada.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

Thank you very much.

Now we'll hear from Willem Adema, who is a senior economist with the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

Good morning, Mr. Adema. Welcome.

You have seven minutes for your presentation.

[Professor Willem Adema, Senior Economist, Social Policy Division, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development]

Thank you very much, Madam Chair.

Thank you very much for having me. I wasn't quite sure what a hearing in the Canadian Parliament entailed, so I've made a little presentation—which, I hope, has been distributed among you and your colleagues—on work we are doing, basically trying to paint a picture of where Canada is standing in comparison to some other OECD countries, international comparisons being our bread and butter. I will just present these numbers, and then I am open to various questions, which I will try to answer at a later stage.

Very quickly, on the first page I have put together for the presentation some gender gaps between labour force participation and employment rates among men and women. You can see that Canada, in terms of labour force participation and employment participation, has smaller gender gaps than many other OECD countries, Japan in particular, but a bit larger than what you see here for Sweden.

Another item I would like to point to on the next page—which was already alluded to by the previous speaker—is the difference in working hours between men and women. On the first panel you will see the incidence of part-time employment across the OECD for men and women, and here again you can see that the gender gap is smaller than in some other countries. Particularly in European countries like the United Kingdom and Germany, part-time employment—less than 30 hours per week—is used as a solution by parents, but mainly mothers, to balance work and family obligations.

You see with the other chart—and this is an issue that until recently has been somewhat neglected, I think—the fact of the prevalence of long working hours. Men are much more likely than women to work for more than 60 hours per week. You can see here, again, that in Canada the gap may not be as stark as in many other OECD countries, but it is there and it is indicative of the issues around gender equality in the labour market.

These factors, together with past choices of men and women in educational areas, contribute to persisting gender pay gaps across the OECD and also in Canada, where it is just below 20%, which is a little higher than the OECD average of just below 15%. You can see that in Sweden and France the pay gaps are noticeably smaller, and in Japan the pay gaps are much wider. That is related to the fact that women in Japan are predominantly working in the non-regular sector, thereby having less access to bonus payments and support from employers. They have a fixed wage while working on a fixed contract that is renewable each year, and show far less earning progression than women in a similar job, let alone men.

On the next page we are in the process of preparing an agenda report for the ministerial council meeting we have here in May, and we're analyzing the factors underlying the gender wage gap. I've put here on the chart a Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition, which gives some insight into factors that underlie gender pay gaps. As you can see, in many countries—including in Canada, a little bit—the workers' characteristics, including education, work in favour of women and have a positive effect on the gender wage gap.

However, long hours by men, part-time hours by women, and characteristics around the job and occupation of women have a negative impact on the gender pay gap.

What is even more important is that with the econometrics we do, you can't cover all the unobservable factors underlying the gender wage gap. You can see that in Canada and the U.K., we can explain a lot of the gender pay gap econometrically, but not all. That gap is wider in many other countries, and that also points to—it is not equivalent to, because as I said, the econometrics are not perfect—the persistence of discrimination in the labour market.

Finally, here are some thoughts about policies.

I support the previous speaker on her call for child care. Child care is a tool that helps both parents to be working. I understand that this early childhood education care might be a provincial responsibility in Canada, so I didn't put anything in here. Similarly, parental leave is an important lever that governments could consider in order to change men's behaviour. There is some research that says that this might be most effectively done around the age of childbirth so that you can change the behaviour of men for a longer time span. With that in mind, about 10 OECD countries have now introduced, in one way or another, a period of leave that is reserved for fathers, either via bonuses, financial incentives, or by giving quota within parental leave legislation that fathers can use on a “use it or lose it” basis. Quebec has something similar to that for about six weeks, but it doesn't exist in other parts of Canada. Amazingly, or surprisingly, countries like Japan and Korea have the longest period of individual entitlements for fathers to leave, which is about a year. This is driven by their main concern about aging populations and low fertility rates. The concern is that women cannot balance work and family life without the support of the man. Therefore, policy is now promoting men to take leave to care for children.

I presume that finger means that I have to stop.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

Yes, exactly.

Thank you very much; that was excellent.

We're going to go now to Ann Decter, who is with YMCA Canada, and you also have seven minutes.

[Ann Decter, Director, Advocacy and Public Policy, YWCA Canada]

I'm actually with YWCA Canada.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

Oh, sorry.

[Ann Decter]

YMCA doesn't really advocate on these issues.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

No, you're right.

[Ann Decter]

Good morning. Thank you for inviting YWCA Canada to contribute to this study.

Since our founding in the late 1800s, YWCA Canada's member associations have provided essential programs and services to women and girls, including being the leading provider of employment programs for women in Canada. Throughout Canada's history, we have advocated for policies that will improve the lives of the women and girls we serve.

As a federated national association, YWCA Canada's strategic priorities are set by our 32 member associations, which work in nine provinces and two territories. Our priorities reflect the needs of the women and girls using their services on a daily basis.

Our current national priorities include reconciliation work with aboriginal women; inclusion for newcomer, refugee, and immigrant women; addressing violence against women; national child care; women's housing and homelessness; and women's economic equality. Our perspective on women's economic security is grounded in these priorities.

At 51%, women are a slight majority of Canada's population, and have been for almost 40 years. Overall, Canada has an aging population. Fifty-five per cent of all seniors in Canada, those 65 and over, are women, and this increases with age. Women make up 63% of those 85 to 89 and 72% of those aged 90 and over.

Employment for senior women has nearly doubled over the last decade, but their median annual income is one-third lower than men's, and they are twice as likely to live in poverty.

Poverty rates have risen dramatically for senior women who aren't part of an economic union, tripling from 9% in 1995 to 28% in 2015. Much of that period saw government budgets in Canada's social safety net drastically reduced.

Economic security varies widely across populations of women in Canada. Aboriginal people are the fastest-growing population, and their population age structure differs significantly from the non-aboriginal or settler population. Only 6% of aboriginal women are seniors, compared to 15% of settler women; 27% are aboriginal girls under 15, compared to 16% of the non-aboriginal women population. The median age, the age at which half the population is older and half younger, of all women in Canada is 41. It's 29, 12 years lower, for first nation, Métis, and Inuit women.

Statistics about aboriginal women describe the youngest and fastest-growing populations of women in the country. For example, the number of aboriginal women in our federal prisons increased 97% between 2002 and 2012. Correctional Service of Canada has described an average aboriginal woman in prison as 27, with limited education, unemployed at the time of arrest, and a sole-support mother of two to three children.

In addition to the points that follow, strategies to ensure economic security for indigenous women in Canada will need to include everything from ensuring the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls is successful, and honouring the women and their families, and then putting the country on a course to reduce violence against aboriginal women, to implementation of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples—including free, prior and informed consent—to full implementation of the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal order to the federal government to end discrimination against first nations children, to funding of child welfare and full use of Jordan's principle. It calls for the kind of fundamental change in relationship described by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

Steady increases in women's participation in the labour force since the 1950s have given Canada a labour force that is virtually gender balanced. For the last decade, women have consistently made up more than 47% of people employed in Canada. By 2015, there were more educated working-age women in the population than men. Sixty-nine per cent of women aged 25 to 64 had a university, college, or trade degree, diploma, or certificate, compared to 64% of men, yet women working full time and year-round earn about 72% of what men earn in comparable work.

In Canada, women as a population are now better educated than men, but paradoxically still have lower incomes and consequently are poorer and less economically secure.

As education is known to correlate positively with income, we are left with the question of why is this not happening for women in Canada, what barriers prevent women's economic security, and what measures can successfully address them.

There are many, and I will talk about a couple today in the time I have.

As stated by other speakers, Canada has a significant gender pay gap. YWCA Canada recommends legislated pay equity to close the pay gap. On October 5, 2016, the House of Commons promised to implement proactive legislation on pay equity by the end of 2018. The complaint-based model of pay equity needs to be replaced with legislation framing it as a human right, and the recommendations of the 2004 task force report are a good place to start.

To obtain economic security, women need unimpeded access to safe workplaces with workplace protections. Women are the majority of minimum-wage workers, as others have said, and make up seven out of 10 part-time workers. Regardless of age group, women are more likely to be working part time, at approximately four times the rate of men. A good proportion of women cited personal or family responsibilities as the reason they are doing this. Only 2% of men cite the same reason.

Child care is, as Justice Abella has said, the ramp to women's equality. It's also key to economic security for women with children. Child care increases mothers' access to the workforce and, as the data from Quebec bears out, is a proven anti-poverty tool. Quebec's low-cost, broad-based child care confirms child care as an effective social policy to address poverty for women, in particular for women raising families on their own, by dramatically increasing their access to employment. In Quebec, between the introduction of child care as a social policy in 1996 and 2008, employment rates for mothers with children under the age of six increased by 22%. The number of single mothers on social assistance was reduced by more than half, from 99,000 to 45,000, and their after-tax median income rose by 81%.

YWCA Canada recommends that the federal government proceed without delay to establish broad national access to low-cost child care through moving forward on the promised child care framework. Given women's education and employment status, lack of national child care is a yawning social policy gap.

Early child development for aboriginal children needs to be defined by their communities and to take into account the profound distrust of having young children in any kind of national care system.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

Excellent.

Ladies, the information that you presented was excellent. We do have your presentation, Mr. Adema, but I did have a request from the committee members to ask you to send your notes to the clerk. That would be wonderful.

We're going to start in to our first round of questioning with Monsieur Serré.

Mr. Serré, you have seven minutes.

[Marc Serré, Liberal, Nickel Belt, ON]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you so much to the witnesses for your presentations today and for your work. I'm just amazed, and I'm very fortunate to be on this committee. There's so much to be done, and there's some action to be taken.

Obviously, from the committee's perspective and, I would assume, over the past 30 years, we have heard a lot of what the issues are. We focus a lot on comparing provinces with provinces, but I want to turn to the OECD with my first question to Mr. Adema.

You're looking at other countries, at best practices in other countries, such as Japan. Can you elaborate a bit about the issue of the gender wage gap? You've mentioned some of the recommendations, but what specific role do you feel the federal government should play to address the gender wage gap in Canada, given your experience with other countries?

[Prof. Willem Adema]

That's a very good question, and a tough one, in the sense that governments cannot just by law reduce the gender pay gap just like that. As you will be well aware, there are lots of people in the labour force who made their educational choices 20 and 30 years ago, and their career patterns cannot just be changed overnight.

I think what governments can do is make the playing field level, so to speak. In parental leave systems, governments must try to get a greater gender balance in leave-taking. If you leave it to the parents, they will in general choose to have the partner who has the lower earnings take the leave, as the opportunity costs are lower. That is often the mother. You're not going to generate change like that.

If you want to change that behaviour, you have to think about quotas or the bonus programs to try to encourage men to take their leave as well, or to work part time as well, because as long as employers expect women to work part time or to take leave, they are likely to invest less in women than in men.

That's one thing.

Child care has been mentioned. It levels the playing field between parents. Both can then participate in the labour force. In terms of the pay gap, over the last few years we have seen some countries take measures to get more transparency on payment within companies, countries that try to force companies of a certain size, most notably, to publish what they pay their men and women. Pay transparency is one of the things that governments could directly enhance.

[Marc Serré, Liberal, Nickel Belt, ON]

Thank you—

[Prof. Willem Adema]

But it's complicated, because pay is of course an issue in social partner negotiations between employers and unions. Governments can't just barge in and say, in a collective agreement bargaining system, that you have to do this or that.

[Marc Serré, Liberal, Nickel Belt, ON]

Thank you.

Ms. Dugal, you tweaked my interest earlier when you talked about women being more educated than men, and then you talked about a retraining program for women. Can you elaborate a bit on the successes you've had with that program?

[Anuradha Dugal]

Yes, absolutely. We have focused on women retraining in trades and technology. In particular, we have looked at women-only programs. One of the reasons for that is obviously the gender bias, which we have spoken about many times, in industries that have been more typically attractive to men.

We find that the gender bias can be addressed. Those industries are also higher-paying—that's one of the reasons we picked them—and have more opportunities to allow women to have stronger gains in their income over time. In Edmonton, for example, we picked Women Building Futures, which is a construction company that teaches women construction skills. WEE Society in Nova Scotia teaches women shipbuilding skills. Those organizations also have individual relationships with their provinces in terms of the skill need in that province at that time, which also pushes them to make sure they're building a workforce that is responsive to the local organizations.

However, one thing that we haven't been able to address is gender bias in apprenticeships and gender bias once work placement happens. Those things need policies. They need champions. They need women in the workforce who will continue to mentor and coach women. What we've found is that it has to be long term. You might train a woman and you might put her in a job, but if she doesn't have a support system—which, again, is a typical thing that men going into construction or going into trades build for themselves—if she doesn't have that, which doesn't typically exist, she will not succeed. Those have to be found.

[Marc Serré, Liberal, Nickel Belt, ON]

Thank you.

With a minute left, I wanted to get a comment on parental leave. As I indicated at the last meeting, I took 10 weeks for my children. That was the maximum I could take.

I would like to know from the three of you if there is a recommendation to have a year's parental leave for men, as in Japan. Is that specifically something that you would put in a recommendation here to the committee to remove some of the stigma? Would that be beneficial?

[Ann Decter]

A new additional paid leave for men that could only be taken by them? If it's additional, yes.

[Marc Serré, Liberal, Nickel Belt, ON]

If it's additional? Okay.

[Anuradha Dugal]

Yes.

[Marc Serré, Liberal, Nickel Belt, ON]

Do you have any specific recommendations around that?

[Ann Decter]

I think the evidence is that if it's not leave that can only be taken by men, it doesn't get taken up to the same degree.

[Marc Serré, Liberal, Nickel Belt, ON]

Shared or...?

[Ann Decter]

If it's shared, women still take more of it.