Thank you. I have been on this computer on Zoom and Teams all day with the government. Again, I'm Rhonda Barnet, president and COO of Avit Manufacturing in Peterborough.
I was the first female chair in Canada's history of Canada's largest trade association, Canadian Manufacturers & Exporters, from 2016 through to 2018. With the full support of the sector and the national board, I started women in manufacturing, which is what I want to talk to you about today.
I've been selected to be one of the nine Canadians working with Monique Leroux on the industry strategy council to help government. It's an industry-led strategy to advise government on nine critical sectors to grow the economy. I've been on that meeting all day today with three ministers, constantly carrying the torch of gender equality and building a gender-balanced economy and recovery as we go into the next phase.
I want to talk to you a little bit about the background of what brought women in manufacturing forward, what the federal government has done, the difference we made, and then the problems that COVID has caused, the recovery and how we build out that gender-balanced recovery. Manufacturing is a sector where the wage gap between men and women is very negligible, especially in entry-level jobs, and we're working very hard to shift to that. There's a real opportunity to engage more women in this sector and elevate them in the economy.
I would like to give you a bit of background. Manufacturing is one of the three engines of the Canadian economy: manufacturing, mining and agriculture. We need to make things, grow things and develop things, and add value to them to make money. We build a service economy on that. It's a very important sector in the Canadian economy. We represent 10% of employment, which is about 1.8 million jobs, as well as 10% of GDP, which is $620 billion in Canada. For every direct job in manufacturing, up to three other jobs are created in the economy.
We have a great opportunity as we recover to build out this sector, engage more women and have a more gender-balanced economy. Manufacturing is vitally important to the economy. Women are vitally important to the success of the sector.
Historically, employment numbers in manufacturing for women were grossly under-represented. The last 30 years the dial hasn't changed. Of the gross number of jobs, out of the 1.8 million jobs, we are looking at about 460,000 jobs that women held in the sector.
When I came on in 2016, we wanted to make a difference.
We worked together with Minister Monsef and Women and Gender Equality to set up a program and move the dial. We needed the talent to grow our sector. Women were grossly under-represented. We put in a bunch of programs. You can look at our website, womeninmanufacturing.ca. It's world class. I travel the world talking about what we're doing in Canada. A lot of countries are starting to learn from us.
We set these programs together. We received a grant of almost half a million dollars over three years to put the program in place. We have things like free diversity tool kits that apply to male-dominated industries. There are some great tools there; please go and see those. There are tons of tools and programming.
A year and a half through the program, we were really making a difference. We call this program “We can do it”; it's a modern-day Rosie the Riveter. Our goal was to add 100,000 net new jobs for women in our sector over five years. In one and a half years, we added almost 55,000 net new jobs for women in the sector, as of February from Statistics Canada. We didn't even get a chance to celebrate that. We passed our halfway mark in just a year and half. The share of jobs held by women increased from 28% to 29.6% of the total jobs in manufacturing. It was a huge win for the sector, for women and for Canada. Then March happened and COVID happened.
I want to talk to you about that. I want to talk to you about the she-session. I was urged today on the council to give some strong data points. Today I am here to give you the data, to let you know just how bad it is and how much work we need to do to double down. We have the tools. We have the government, policies and people to engage women in the economy. We have to double down and do more of that because of what happened.
In April, manufacturing lost just over 300,000 jobs compared with February. Women were 29% of the labour force, but they lost 38% of the jobs, whereas men, who had held 70% of the jobs, lost 62% of the jobs. Job losses for women were negatively disproportionate to their share of jobs in the sector. Even more concerning than that, the sector is rallying, which is good. There's recovery. There's rehiring going on. In May the sector recovered 79,100 jobs. The June data will be released, I think, this Friday. Both men and women saw some partial rebounding, obviously, through these numbers, but men were called back in much greater numbers.
I had our statistician do a deep dive on this because I wanted to share some of this with you. Women earned only 15% of the recovered jobs in the sector. We lost more jobs and we're recovering less. The gap is widening. It's a serious problem. Men recovered 85% of the jobs. When we looked at it—I'm going to break it down for you—it was men who had children who were over the age of 18. It was even men outside of the sector who got brought back in. Your points around child care are well taken, and I have some other thoughts on that.
My hypothesis to this problem that I want to share with you today is that women have seen greater job losses and fewer recovered jobs, possibly on a voluntary basis. In our sector, women might have put their hands up because they had to out of a direct need to care for children and aging parents. I'm sure that's something you've been talking about all day.
To verify this, I looked at the multi-use microdata files, PUMF, and across tabulated age of youngest child in the home and the sex of the worker—so looking at the gender of the worker and the youngest kid in the homes—just to see what impact child care did have. As expected, women in households whose youngest child was less than six years old or between six and 12 years old, which were the categories, suffered the biggest job losses, 33,000 job losses. Men in households with the youngest child less than six also saw significant job losses, 18,000 job losses. In fact, both men and women with young school-age or preschool children have suffered a lot of layoffs in our sector.
What we've heard is that many parents, especially women, were hanging on by a thread to maintain employment and care for their children. It's been a very serious issue. We're predominantly production workers. We do have other avenues where people can work from home or work part shifts, etc., but there's a very serious issue here.
Again, the interesting statistic is that men in households whose youngest child was between 18 and 24 years old have seen their employment rise over the pandemic by 13%. That category actually had increases, not decreases, in job levels in our sector. That means that, when the sector went back to the labour market to add capacity in May, net new jobs were awarded to men, basically, with adult children, which is not a surprise. We needed labour. Those are the people who could be recalled, maybe, from disrupted sectors.
The data does suggest that caring for children is a serious factor to consider as we look at plans to rebuild the economy through growth in jobs, especially. I'm talking specifically in my own sector, in manufacturing.
What are the next steps and recommendations from my seat? Manufacturing is absolutely a growth opportunity for the economy. We were already set in a plan to double the output of manufacturing, and we were desperate to find workers. We're going to get back there, and we want to double down and work with the CME women in manufacturing programs. They were working. We had moved the dial. It was so exciting. We gained 55,000 jobs, but we lost 100,000 jobs overnight, so we're way behind.
Now we have to double down and really re-engage women back into the economy. We need to ensure that we engage women in all sectors and in our sector to prepandemic levels. That's a very serious issue.