I get to answer the question everybody always has: What is the current state of gender equality in Canada?
Prior to budget 2018, we had a GBA+ action plan, but there was something missing. What was missing was a framework for guiding us in our action on gender equality, what our priorities were, where we were heading and how we would know we got there.
In budget 2018 we released the gender results framework. This framework comprises six pillars, six key areas of action, if you will. Within those areas of action, we have objectives and some indicators that we're paying attention to in terms of monitoring our progress on gender equality. It's with that framework that I'll walk you through what the current state of gender equality is in Canada.
Starting on page 12 with education and skills development, in Canada, boys are less likely than girls to complete high school. Here's why a GBA+ and an intersectional lens is important. When you drill down and take a look at indigenous peoples in Canada, you see the story is much different. Indigenous women have lower high school completion rates than non-indigenous women. When you take a look at indigenous men, you see it's even lower. When we take a look at Inuit men in Canada, we see they have the lowest high school completion rate, at 55%.
Women are under-represented in some fields of study and overrepresented in others. They're under-represented in sciences, technology, engineering and math. They're overrepresented in education, business and health.
When we take a look at economic participation and prosperity, we see we've increased labour force participation rates of women in Canada, but they're still lower than men's rates.
When we take a look at one key indicator of economic prosperity, the gender wage gap, we see that we have a gender wage gap of 12¢. We see women make 88¢ for every dollar men make, when we take a look at hourly wages.
StatsCan just released this week some new data on this. When we take a look at annual income, we see that it's even worse. It's 70¢, and so there's a 30¢ wage gap.
You also see a different wage gap when you take a look at fields, occupational segregation. We have the largest wage gap in the natural resources and agriculture sector. Women make 43¢ for every dollar men make.
Second in line is trades and transport, the male-dominated fields. We have the smallest wage gap in the women-dominated fields, health and business.
In terms of the wage gap, I note there are a lot of things driving it, such as gender norms around unpaid work and interruptions in the labour force for women in terms of maternity leave. We sometimes call that the motherhood penalty. We also know that women are more likely than men to work part time, and in temporary or lower-paying jobs.
When we take a look at leadership and democratic participation, we see that in 2018 women accounted for 48% of employment, but only 33% of those who were employed were in senior management positions. Women account for only 10% of C-suite executives at Canada's 100 largest publicly traded corporations.
When we take a look at GIC appointments, we see we're almost at parity, at 49%.
When we take a look at corporate board memberships, we see that overall in Canada, women make up 18% of director seats. That's a slight increase from 2016. When we take a look at the top 500 companies in Canada, we see that women account for a bit more, 25%, and for the first time since 2001, at least 10% of all board directors in every single sector were women.
I'll move on to gender-based violence and access to justice. Women are overrepresented as victims of police-reported intimate partner violence, accounting for 80% of victims in 2017. When we take a look at homicide by an intimate partner, again women account for 80% of victims. When we look at sexual assault, only 5% of sexual assault reports come to the attention of police. Indigenous women are three times more likely than non-indigenous women to experience sexual assault, and though they make up approximately 4% of the population, account for 11% of all missing women and 16% of homicides in Canada. Those who identify as lesbian, gay or bisexual are twice as likely to experience violent victimization in Canada than those who identify as heterosexual.
With regard to poverty reduction, health and well-being, the poverty rate is similar between men and women, but again, this is why GBA+ is so important. When you look at single mothers, single fathers, recent immigrants, indigenous peoples and two-spirit and transgender youth, they're much more represented among those who are living in poverty. It's the same thing for core housing need, where those groups are overrepresented. When we look at health, men and boys are three times more likely than women to die by suicide. However, women are three times more likely to attempt suicide. This comes down to the choice of method of suicide. Men tend to choose methods that are much more certain.
On gender equality around the world, women's rights organizations are the most significant factor in influencing systemic changes and policy changes toward gender equality, but only 0.5% of the total aid earmarked for OECD gender-specific programming went to women's rights organizations in 2014. When we look at parliamentarians globally, we see an improvement between 1997 and 2019, from 12% to 24%. Women make up more than two-thirds of the world's illiterate population. In conflict zones, girls are 2.5 times more likely to be out of school than boys. When we look at gender-based violence globally, one in three women worldwide are estimated to have experienced physical or sexual intimate partner violence. At least 200 million women and girls worldwide have been subjected to female genital mutilation.
