Thank you so much for that excellent question.
Women's economic well-being is a key determinant—not the only one—to their vulnerabilities to other hardships, including violence. It's the right thing to do to put women who choose to be out there, as Raquel mentioned, in STEM fields, but also in traditional fields. If you want to work, we should do everything we can to remove barriers from that work. It's the right thing to do, and it's fair. Also, given the shortage in labour that our country is experiencing, like so many other countries, with declining birth rates and aging populations, it is smart to get as many women into the workforce as possible. One of the ways we're doing that is with the Canada child benefit. It provides families with a guaranteed income every month. It's means tested and its purpose is to help families decide how they want to spend that money, whether it's on child care or other responsibilities.
Another is investing directly in child care spaces. We set aside $7.5 billion for our child care framework to create some 40,000 spaces. Each province and territory then came to the table and we signed bilateral agreements as to how many more child care spaces they would add on. More than 20,000 of those spaces have already been created.
That's one of the ways we're doing that work.
We are working to support more women to enter those non-traditional fields because they are high-wage jobs and because it's one of the fastest ways to lift women out of poverty. Initiatives like pilot projects that we brought in—my colleague Navdeep Bains is working to encourage more girls and young people to code, for example—are one way to do that. We have a women entrepreneurship strategy too. Right now, only 16.5% of businesses in Canada are women owned or majority owed by women. Surely we can do better than that. We have a strategy to do better to start up and scale up those women's businesses.
Then there's pay equity. This group includes members who worked hard on advocating for pay equity. We introduced pay equity legislation. One of the significant barriers is the way that we value women's work. By paying women equally for work of equal value, we help to address some of the wage gap that has been so persistent.