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.