Status of Women Committee on Feb. 9th, 2017

[Ted Falk, Conservative, Provencher, MB]

Okay, thank you.

Professor Nesbitt, I'll just come back to you. I got onto an airplane last week and there were two executives walking in, a male and a female, and the male sat beside me in the business section, and the female walked by and she said, “Well, John, aren't you going to give up your seat for a woman?” and she walked back to economy.

Like, why would she do that?

[Prof. Marjorie Griffin Cohen]

Really...?

[Prof. Richard Nesbitt]

Human beings have many frailties and weaknesses. And by the way, we could have a story about a man who did something that was untoward. Right? So I don't think we can take any individual circumstance, and I think we have to keep a sense of humour about all of this.

[Ted Falk, Conservative, Provencher, MB]

Okay, good. Thank you.

[Prof. Richard Nesbitt]

And that was probably a joke.

[Ted Falk, Conservative, Provencher, MB]

Okay.

[Prof. Richard Nesbitt]

It's normal human nature to sort of say I wish I could sit up in business class, except my policy says I have to go to the back of the plane. So we have to be able to take a joke.

[Ted Falk, Conservative, Provencher, MB]

Okay, thank you. That's fair.

I'd like to share my time with my colleague.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

All right.

Go ahead, Ms. Harder.

[Rachael Thomas, Conservative, Lethbridge, AB]

Thank you.

Mr. Nesbitt, my background is researching sociology, so I understand that when we do research, of course, there are control factors that have to be accounted for. And, of course, research can be interpreted in a variety of ways. You can read things into it, should you wish to.

I'm curious with regard to the studies you've done. Have you looked at every sector across the board, and have you found the same thing, that it is in fact true that close to an equal number of men and women always results in greater productivity, regardless of the sector you're looking at?

[Prof. Richard Nesbitt]

We're relying on other researchers generally, and they are looking at public companies most often, because that's where you can get the data, and it's on a very geographic-diverse basis. So this applies in China just as much as it does in Europe or as it does in Canada. I'm confident that the results are pretty clear and they're pretty universal.

Some people would argue that what you're measuring is not causation. You're just observing something that's happening. I think that's a cop-out. To say if we have 58 out of 60 studies saying that it's going to improve your company, I think that's pretty good evidence that it's going to improve your company.

It's more difficult in social sciences, as you would know, to prove causation. But I think we can be pretty sure that there's something going on here, particularly when you start to see there's a mathematical relationship in this in terms of adding one more woman and your company improves even more. But you will never be able to get over that argument. And if we allow people to say that this is not proving causation, therefore we should ignore it, I think it's a cop-out.

[Rachael Thomas, Conservative, Lethbridge, AB]

Sir—

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

Okay, that's the end of our session, sadly.

I want to thank our witnesses. If you think of something that you think might help the study that we're doing, feel free to submit that to the clerk.

And for the committee, the clerk has informed me that the budget for the study is now available. It's $39,200. It's a deal. Although you have not seen the budget, I could accept a motion today to approve the budget; or if you prefer, I could send you the budget and you could look at it and we could have that motion next Tuesday.

I hear the latter. All right. We shall send that out to you.

We're going to suspend while we change panels. Thanks again to our witnesses.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

We're ready to begin our second panel.

We're very fortunate to have folks with us by teleconference today. We have Tammy Schirle, associate professor in the department of economics at Wilfrid Laurier, coming to us by video conference in a moment. We also have Margot Young, a professor at the University of British Columbia, who probably deserves a medal because, if you consider the time differential, it's quite early for her.

Margot, we give you an extra gold star for being here at this time of the morning.

Then we're very fortunate to have Ramona Lumpkin, the president and vice-chancellor of Mount Saint Vincent University, with us in person today.

We're going to start off with each of you having seven minutes for your comments, beginning with Ms. Schirle.

[Dr. Tammy Schirle, Associate Professor, Department of Economics, Wilfrid Laurier University, As an Individual]

Thank you for the opportunity to appear before you. I am currently an associate professor of economics at Wilfrid Laurier University. I specialize in labour economics with a focus on issues related to public policy, gender, and retirement.

Broadly speaking, I believe the economic security of women has improved substantially over the past 50 years. I suggest this is largely due to women's increased participation in the paid-labour market, providing women with earnings, pensions, and other income that is independent of the decisions of their spouse.

In my short time I would like to bring three items to the committee's attention. First, I will suggest improvements to the working incoming tax benefit that would promote greater independence of women in their career decisions. Second, I will suggest a general review of income-tested benefits available to older women. Third, I will highlight my current work on gender wage gaps, demonstrating that the wage premium enjoyed in male-dominated occupations does not simply reflect greater skills being used in those male-dominated occupations.

First, I will discuss the working income tax benefit, or WITB. The WITB is a non-refundable tax credit that offers a wage subsidy to some individuals with low annual earnings. The current program offers a 25% wage subsidy, which will increase to 26% in 2019. The wage subsidy increases the effective wage rate, and evidence suggests this will push low-wage workers to increase how much they work in a year. As such, the WITB can work to promote attachment to paid work and lead to greater economic security in the future.

However, there are two problems with the WITB. First, for married women, eligibility depends on a couple's income. In practice, this means a low-wage woman's effective wage rate depends on the decisions of her spouse. In general, it is suggested that, in the interest of promoting and supporting gender equity, policies affecting labour market incentives should focus on the individual unit when assessing income rather than on the family.

Second, in cases where both spouses are low earners, only one member of the couple can apply for the WITB. This means a woman must negotiate with her spouse to be eligible for the subsidy. Again, this implies a low-wage woman's effective wage rate depends on the decisions of her spouse.

For these reasons, I suggest that section 122.7 of the Income Tax Act be amended to make the WITB eligibility depend on individuals', rather than couples', circumstances.

I will now now discuss income-tested benefits available to older individuals. Canada's retirement income system was largely designed in the 1960s and 1970s. Many of its characteristics reflect how families organized themselves at that time. The system needs updating to better reflect current and future family structure. As an example, I would like to highlight the availability of the allowance under part III of the Old Age Security Act. In cases where a spouse of a pensioner is aged 60 to 64 or a widow is aged 60 to 64, an income supplement or allowance is available. This policy recognized that most women are younger than their husbands, and there is limited attachment to the labour market among older generations.

However, there are no similar benefits available to low-income women aged 60 to 64 who are divorced or simply never married. As a broad statement, I believe it would be useful to undertake a serious review of the various policies supporting older Canadians embedded in our tax system and the retirement income system. There are many opportunities to better target those most in need, make the system more transparent to taxpayers, and update the system to better meet the needs of current and future generations of women.

Finally, I want to highlight some of the gender wage gap research I have under way. As you know, women earn a lower hourly wage on average than men. Economists spend a lot of time trying to break apart that difference and understand what drives it. One thing is clear: occupational segregation drives a large part of that wage gap.

We question whether the wage premium enjoyed in male-dominated occupations seems justified, in the sense that some jobs require more skill, and employers would reasonably pay higher wages for high-skills jobs. We separately examined industries to recognize that different industries require and value different skills. Our results provide clear evidence that the male wage premium is not universally justified. There are a handful of industries in which the wage premium seems justified as paying higher wages for higher skills. However, in many industries the part of the wage gap explained by occupational segregation does not represent a gender gap in skills. It is simply a premium enjoyed in male-dominated occupations that, from our vantage point, cannot be explained.

As a work in progress, using Statistics Canada's confidential data in our research data centre, I'm not able at this time to present detailed results, but I can offer a copy of our report in March.

I suggest that the type of research we are doing could be used as an evidence base in the development of new pay equity policies applied at an industry level in the private sector. While largely under provincial jurisdiction, there are opportunities within the federal jurisdiction to advance pay equity in the private sector.

Thank you for your attention today. I am happy to answer any of your questions.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

Thanks very much.

We'll now go to Margot Young, out at UBC. You have seven minutes.

Would you turn on your microphone, please. We can't hear you yet. All right, we'll give you some time to work on that with our audio folks.

In the meantime, we will go to Ms. Ramona Lumpkin. You have seven minutes.

[Ramona Lumpkin, President and Vice-Chancellor, Mount Saint Vincent University, As an Individual]

Thanks very much, and thanks for the opportunity to speak with the committee today on its important work.

My appearance here today is serendipitous. I was scheduled to meet yesterday with Elizabeth May, Marilyn Gladu, and Sheila Malcolmson about their work on the all-party women's caucus in connection with some work I'm doing with Universities Canada, and Marilyn said, “Oh, are you free tomorrow morning?” I was, so I am here, and delighted to be here.

I have been engaged with Universities Canada, where I'm a board member, on work to promote women's leadership at Canadian universities over the past almost two years. We recognize that, as in many other sectors, women's leadership in Canadian universities has been stuck for almost two decades. About 20% of our 97 Canadian university presidents are women now, and that has been the case for about the last two decades. We wonder why. We are very concerned that there are patterns here and that there are forces happening that we should examine, analyze, and try to change. We are seeking advice and support from other advocacy groups for women's leadership as well, and hoping that in the work we do we can start to see some significant progress.

You would think that in higher education, where, as we know, over half of the undergraduates now are women and in many fields women's participation is growing rapidly, we would have that senior leadership, but that is not the case.

My university, Mount Saint Vincent University, since its beginning in the mid-19th century, has had a core focus on women in leadership. We were founded by the Sisters of Charity of Halifax and, in fact, became the first degree-granting college for women in the British Commonwealth, so we have a very strong mandate to advance women's opportunities in leadership.

We host the Atlantic women in science and engineering chair. There was discussion earlier this morning about the need to advance women in science and engineering and the work that's being done, and that chair...both research and camps for girls, getting them at grade 7 or grade 8 and talking to them about persisting in math and engineering. Those things are, we think, going to make a difference in the long term.

We are also the home of the Centre for Women in Business, the only university-based centre for women in business in the country. They've been doing interesting work for many years now in areas such as supplier diversity, which looks at requiring companies that get federal contracts to show diversity in the suppliers they're engaging.

There are many things at work in the issues we still face with regard to women's economic participation in our country's well-being and women's opportunities for leadership. We've certainly made progress over the last 150 years, but we've hit a plateau in many cases, and progress now seems slower than it was in earlier periods.

Many of us are working, as your committee is—for which we can be very grateful—to root out the causes and, more importantly, to look at forging some solutions. Some of the causes are structural, and we have quite a lot of research to show that. Professor Nesbitt referred to the “plumbing”. Another metaphor that a colleague of mine used, which I like very much, is “The boys built the playground”: the equipment, the slides, the swings, it's all made to fit the traditional patterns of male participation in the workforce. I think it's important—and Professor Nesbitt mentioned this as well—that there is no pernicious plot to keep women out on the part of the boys who built that playground. It has just been naturalized. It feels right that things are organized in that way.

We have to start picking that apart and finding out what's in fact not natural but constructed, and what can be changed. For example, because of the way things are structured, and partly because of home and family responsibilities, which still rest predominantly with women, women won't have necessarily the opportunity to network after hours, to hang out and make those business contacts and have the opportunity to connect with mentors and sponsors. One field where my university does offer a degree is in hospitality and tourism, and in that field you progress by being moved to different markets in progressively more senior positions. Again, there's a pattern in our playground where the men will move with families, but women have traditionally been much less mobile, much less prepared to move their family with them for their work. This is true not only in the hospitality industry, but it's also true in banking. It's true in many sectors.

Am I out of time?

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

You have one minute left.

[Ramona Lumpkin]

I didn't have time to prepare, so I'm obviously finding some things to say. Some of it is cultural and more subtle. I think certainly in my experience the voice of authority is the bass voice. We hear that. I still find that many young women whom I mentor on my campus come to me and talk about their lack of confidence, their lack of belief that they can step up and say,“Put me in, coach. I'm ready to do the job.” They don't have that ingrained confidence that I think many of our young men do. There are many more subtle things in culture that we also are going to need to work on changing. I'll stop there.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

Excellent.

Now we're going to try again with Margot Young at UBC.

Go ahead.

[Professor Margot Young, Professor, Allard School of Law, University of British Columbia, As an Individual]

Thanks. It's a real pleasure to be able to speak with the committee this morning.

My professional work focuses on issues of women's equality, specifically in reference to constitutional law, international human rights, and social justice and the law. I've worked with a number of women's equality-seeking groups at both the national and the provincial level, in particular in relation to women's rights and Canada's obligation at the United Nations with respect to women's rights.

I've circulated the remarks I'm making this morning to each of you, along with packages of some materials on the subject matter I'm talking about. That message sits somewhere, I'm sure, amidst dozens of others in your parliamentary mailboxes.

Today I want to urge the committee to recommend that the federal government develop and implement a national gender equality strategy. There are three points I want to make in relation to this topic.

First, I would like to talk briefly about why a national gender equality strategy is desirable. Second, I would like to talk about some specific characteristics of a human rights framework that such a strategy must have. Then I have a few key issues to mention that need to be included in the strategy.

The first topic is why would we want a national gender equity strategy? Discussions of gender inequality commonly reference the notion of systemic inequality. We have done this already this morning. That's the recognition that unequal outcomes result for the institutions and structures of society—political, economic, and social—independent of discrimination or animus that is individual in origin.

It's a complex of institutional practices, attitudes and stereotypes, economic structures, and patterns of social relations that account most meaningfully, most predictably, and most intractably for women's inequality.

The result is that the policy that addresses women's inequality needs to be multifocal, and it needs to look at how these different systemic mechanisms pile onto each other augment and enhance each other. This means that effective policy development and implementation to address women's inequality requires a coherent and a coordinated line of policy. Identification of policy objectives, stages of action, and legislative coordination are key tools for effective policy implementation in this area.

Canada's federal government has already recognized the wisdom of this approach to complex problems by committing to a national housing strategy and a national poverty reduction strategy.

By the same logic, the time is now to commit to a national gender equality strategy. Development of this strategy will mean that policies are more effective, more coherent, and will also communicate that the government takes seriously its obligation to gender equality, and that the government is committed to effective change.

The second point I want to raise has to do with the ways in which a national gender equality strategy would be the fulfillment of Canada's international human rights obligations and, I would argue, its constitutional equality obligations.

As you all know, in 1980 Canada signed on to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women. As a state party to this convention, Canada ideally comes up every four years, albeit not in reality every four years, for what's known as a periodic review before the committee that administers women's convention. The last review took place this last fall, and on November 18 the CEDAW committee released its concluding observations on Canada.

In those concluding observations, the committee emphasizes, importantly, that the Government of Canada needs to implement a national gender strategy, policy, and action plan that addresses the following:

the structural factors causing persistent inequalities, including intersecting forms of discrimination, against women and girls, with a special focus on disadvantaged groups of women and girls, including First Nations, Inuit, Métis, Afro-Canadian, disabled, migrant, refugee, asylum-seeking, single parent, lesbian, bisexual, transsexual and intersex women and girls.

So it's clear that this committee of women's human rights experts, charged by the United States, considers a national gender equality strategy to be a best practice for meeting Canada's human rights obligations under the women's convention. Indeed, Canadian women agree with this.

Just over a week ago, a national campaign was launched with dozens of organizations representing thousands of women signing on to a letter to the Prime Minister calling for a national gender equality strategy. Now, there are a number of key features that mark such a strategy as a human rights document or that mark it as proceeding from a human rights framework. I don't have time to go over these in detail, but I'll list them simply.

First of all, of course, the content, the issues addressed, reflect entitlements that women have, which means these are basically not bargained away or instrumentalized in terms of other objectives such as budgetary concerns or other political goals.

Secondly, a human rights framework demands, as the UN's framing of its recommendation to Canada shows, a commitment to addressing the issues of the most vulnerable and marginalized women as a priority, and a commitment to hearing the voices of those women in the process of structuring the strategy.

Finally, we know that human rights cast collective duties on the government. It's the government's obligation to deliver these conditions of equality; and a strategy must have effective accountability mechanisms, benchmarks, oversight mechanisms, and time frames that ensure that it's an effective policy.

My last point is simply to flag a couple of substantive issues that a national gender equality policy must address. Of course, these are not the only issues that are critical. In the materials I've circulated, there are some important documents set out from the Feminist Alliance for International Action; a list of the policy recommendations from the CEDAW committee; and also a list of those that could be implemented by the federal government within the next 12 months.

Among these is the expression of the key, central need for a national child care framework that ensures universal, available, affordable child care access for all Canadian women. The role that the national government plays in relation to medicare is equivalent to the role that we need our federal government to play in relation to child care. Until quality child care is universally available, progress on other fronts of women's economic inequality will be stalled.

Secondly, adequate housing is of course a key concern. We've been told by the United Nations special rapporteur that Canada has a housing crisis. We need a gender-sensitive approach as the national housing strategy is developed.

Similarly, the national poverty reduction strategy has to reflect the fact that the poverty of women is deeper and different from the poverty men experience. The poorest of the poor are women and we need to have a gender-sensitive lens in crafting the national poverty reduction strategy.

Finally, I want to conclude simply by noting that national strategies address important areas of human rights observance and, currently, failures. This necessitates as well coordination across strategies. Human rights concerns are linked; systems function not in silos, but they network. Strategies have to reflect this. I've already talked about how the strategies around adequate housing, the right to adequate housing, and the right to income security must necessarily have a gendered face. We need to recognize that as we deal with women's inequality and develop strategies to address it. We need a productive synergy across key equality measures respecting the human rights of women, and really, the key to all of this, from the perspective of this committee, is the calculated oversight that a thoughtful national gender equality strategy can deliver.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

Thank you very much.

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

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

Thank you.

Thank you all for your presentations. I'm going to go a little differently with my questions, and direct them more at the university level. We often look to the universities in Canada for leadership and we know from Statistics Canada that more than a half of the students in undergraduate programs, and even in many graduate programs, are women, but as we go to the doctoral level, we see a decline. We also know statistically that there is a marked increase in online education nationally. So that's where my questions are going to based.

I did my first two degrees at the University of Guelph, face to face. I did my third degree in combination, while I was married with two children. When I worked on my Ph.D., I definitely saw a difference in the number of women and men in the programs. As well, when I was the associate dean of faculty with an east coast university, I saw that a number of women whom we would hire would teach part-time. That's the other element I want to focus on, part-time teaching.

I'm wondering, from your experience, whether part-time teaching as well as online delivery feed into the economic insecurity of women.

[Ramona Lumpkin]

I'm happy to say something about online delivery or technological delivery, in particular with regard to my own institution. We were the first university in Atlantic Canada to offer degrees via television, almost 30 years ago. That was predominantly to make higher education accessible to women, because of our particular mission. We are public now, but I think the university was still owned by the Sisters of Charity at that time. We've morphed, of course, from televised courses to online learning, and we offer both face-to-face and online. It certainly is the case that, for many working mothers, for many women, being able to have that flexibility and access does open doors to pursue higher education. It's not necessarily an economic disservice to women and to those in lower economic brackets to offer courses online. It can really help students in their access.

I'll see if my colleagues want to speak.

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

If I could just jump in there as well, on the part-time teaching side, I did my research on the experiences of part-time online teachers, and many of them talked about the physical isolation, and also the fact that, in studying in a Ph.D. program, many students go in assuming they will have a position of tenure as an opportunity. Unfortunately, we know from public universities in Canada that this is not the case. Many of them were actually piecing together an income with part-time online education, which had no benefits, no pension. Although universities across the country have policies, typically, on the the maximum number of online courses someone could teach at one university, the universities are not taking into consideration—maybe they can't—the number of people and faculty who are actually teaching at multiple universities and colleges at one time, not only in Canada but also internationally. They're not making that mentorship connection with their peers or gaining the in-depth conversation that they would have one-on-one if they were physically at a university.