When I was the minister for seniors, we did a study on how the employers can assist unpaid family caregivers so that they can give flexible hours; they're working from home and also creating a supportive environment. Often, if you take too much time off, chances are your colleagues will have to take up your load, and they will ask, “Hey, why are you absent so often?” I think that, again, is an area we have not been able to look at, to support these unpaid family caregivers. That will also have an economic effect on productivity, because most of these women caregivers—including men, but mostly women—have arrived at a time when, whether they want a promotion, whether they want to change from full time to part time, there would be a loss to productivity, and therefore the economic situation of women...and you know....
That is another area. This is never an easy issue, but I want to throw it out so that we are not limited to certain areas, because it's so complex and it involves so many different ages. Also, seniors age into disability, and many of them are women. In that process, again, it affects our programming. When we give grants and contributions to non-profit organizations, that might be an area we should look at.
This is just my experience. I wanted to share with you and the rest of our colleagues that it is an area we might want to look at. For women, for girls—because I also came from an academic background; I used to be a professor in a college and then a university, a polytechnic—one of the things that we look at will be how we can encourage girls to go into the STEM areas, because again, they grow and they mature and if they do not pick that as one of their career choices, chances are that the wage difference between those areas and the other ones like health services and education, will be even bigger.
Again, I'm throwing that at you just for your programming and your consideration.
Have I used up all of my time?