That's a very interesting question. It really does cause me to reflect on almost three decades now of work that I've been doing in the area of pay equity.
As I mentioned, I saw the toll that this kind of litigation took on the women themselves and also on the employers, who sometimes felt personally attacked that they had a discriminatory wage system in place, and that was never the intention. No one ever intentionally set out to create a system of compensation that was intentionally discriminating against women.
There was a lot of angst and a lot of struggle around realizing that this may have crept into the compensation system, and there were a lot of questions. How did that happen? How in the world could we in Canada have reached this point in time where we still have systems that devalue the work done by women?
The way I try to explain it to employers and to unions alike is that it's a historical problem that has developed over time, whereby certain roles that have been undertaken by women in a home environment—the care of children, administrative duties, social duties, taking care of the family's social agenda, that kind of stuff—have been largely taken for granted and not acknowledged as really valuable work contributing to the economy. That is an attitude that prevailed a long time ago and that found its way into our compensation systems. The kinds of work that women would do—caring for others, cleaning up after a meeting or as a clerk, attending to the needs of a superior—were seen to be somehow less valuable because they came naturally to women; that's just what women did.
When you explain to employers that this is just something that has crept into our system. What we have to do now is remove from women the obligation to complain about that and put the obligation, as we're doing with this proactive legislation, on the employers, saying, “Whether you think you have a problem or not, whether you ever intended to discriminate against women, which we assume you didn't, you now have to look at your compensation systems to find out if, somehow, discriminatory pay practices have crept in. That's your job, and I'm going to ensure that it's done.”