This is quite complex for women now.
Before the free trade deals were put in place, it was pretty clear that women were going to be more narrowly channelled into certain kinds of occupations and certain kinds of sectors. This was because we were going to lose the manufacturing sector where women worked. So we did. We pretty much lost women in manufacturing, because they were heavily concentrated not just in the clothing and textile industries but also in boots and shoes and in small electronics. That was a fairly serious loss. A big change has also occurred with data processing, which then was.... We used to have laws whereby you had to do it here. Now we don't. It's all been taken over. So women lost jobs in important areas.
What's happening now is very hard to say, because I don't know what's going to happen with the trade agreements. We've all changed our economy so much over the past 25 years. It's going to be very scary to see what might happen in the future. I can't speculate on that until I see what is likely to happen.
I think we can probably worry about anything that would.... We have a very segregated employment system. It doesn't look like it, mostly for those of us who are in areas where men and women work together, but by and large it has become more intense. We have more precarious work. Unfortunately, although women have been increasingly represented in trade unions, that is beginning to decline too, because of the structure of the workforce. In a way, more precarious work means less protection.
Through this whole age of austerity, from the 1990s on, we've had less and less protection for workers from the employment standards acts within provinces and labour codes. That's been very hard on women, particularly for the very young teenage workers, because they haven't had those kinds of minimal protections.