Thank you for this opportunity to speak on behalf of the Canadian Association of University Teachers, an organization that represents 70,000 academics at 122 universities and colleges.
Women have made significant progress in entering and working in post-secondary education, as you know. This progress benefits us all. Government programs and legislation have been part of that progress.
In spite of this progress, however, women are more concentrated than men in lower ranks, are more likely to have part-time and casual employment, and often receive lower compensation than their male counterparts. Like many other women, they struggle to find and pay for child care, and those from indigenous and equity-seeking groups, as far as we know from the data available, have even less economic security in the academic world.
Today I will discuss three barriers to economic security in the academy as they affect women in post-secondary education specifically: casualization, child care, and discrimination,.
First is precarity. One out of every three university professors has temporary or part-time employment. It's estimated that two women for every man have contracts versus permanent employment. Casual employment now significantly outpaces full-time employment. The data we have indicate this disparity is even more pronounced for racialized women, women with disabilities, and indigenous women.
In addition to providing limited income, few benefits, and no job security, as well as all the negative health impacts that result from from precarity, casual employment makes it very difficult for these women to do the kind of research and writing that could lead to full-time employment in what has become a highly competitive job market as a result of both cutbacks in funding and new managerial strategies.
The federal government can address casualization in universities in a number of ways. First, it can increase transfers to post-secondary education. Federal government operating grants made up 80% of total university operating revenues in 1990. By 2014 it was less than 50%. These reductions have been a driver in the move to casual employment, and more funding, as well as more stable funding, could promote full-time hiring.
Second, the federal government can work with the provinces and territories to ensure protections through employment legislation for workers in precarious employment, including ladders to full-time employment. Such protections require monitoring and enforcement regimes to discourage employers from using temporary or part-time arrangements to undercut permanent full-time jobs or from unduly exploiting precarious workers.
Third, the federal government could use its significant procurement clout to require contractors accessing public money to demonstrate that they provide decent work.
Fourth, the federal government should assess all social programs to ensure that they support precarious workers. In the case of employment insurance, for example, because of the kinds of hours they work and the way those hours are counted, many part-time and contract academic workers are ineligible for benefits, even though they pay into the program.
Let me turn to our second barrier, lack of child care. Like women throughout Canada, women in academe desperately need a universal, accessible child care program, but the lack of such a program has a particular impact on them. The demands of academic work extend well beyond the classroom, and this is particularly the case for women who are in or seek leadership positions. Without reliable, affordable, full-time child care, academic women may turn down such work or even leave employment. Those with unpredictable part-time or contract work may turn down work because they cannot arrange child care or afford to do so when an offer turns up, especially as is often the case when the offer comes with conditions of beginning the work immediately or within a week.
The CAUT has welcomed the federal-provincial-territorial 10-year agreement on early learning and child care. It is an important step, but the agreement falls short of providing the affordable, flexible, high-quality, fully inclusive child care that allows women to participate equitably in the labour force.
Our third barrier relates to discrimination, the intersections of discrimination for many, and how the forms of discrimination affect women in terms of both compensation and professional advancement.
We are pleased to see that the government recognizes that pay equity is a human right that requires proactive legislation. We urge the government to proceed with such legislation and to use it as a means of ensuring those contracted for government work and government-funded research demonstrate they provide equitable compensation for all, including for those doing part-time and contract work.
We also recommend that the legislation take up the 2004 pay equity task force recommendation to look at the ways racialization, indigeneity, sexual orientation, and disability status affect earnings.
The federal government can also help address discrimination by strengthening the employment equity program, specifically in our case the federal contractors program. That program requires employers working with the federal government to tackle the systemic barriers to economic prosperity for aboriginal and equity-seeking Canadians. Changes to the federal contractors program made in 2013 raised the threshold for compliance with employment equity requirements by federal contractors from $200,000 to $1 million, which leaves out many.
We recommend the threshold be significantly lowered to ensure that those receiving federal funding be required to take action on employment equity and that the enforcement regime be strengthened.
The federal government can also help support women's career advancement by becoming a stronger partner in assuring equity and inclusion in research that is funded by the federal government. Women researchers receive fewer federal research dollars than their male counterparts, depriving the research community and Canadians as a whole of valuable perspectives, experiences, and knowledge.
The federal government needs to act on the recommendations of the advisory panel on federal support for fundamental science to increase Canada's investment in independent research via a federal funding increase of $1.3 billion for basic research, with better-balanced allocation across the three research-granting agencies. This is a gender issue because women disproportionately do research in the humanities and social sciences and in basic research, while the money disproportionately goes to the other sciences.
We thank the committee for taking on these important issues for women's economic security and look forward to your questions.
Thank you.