The gap between male and female representation in the Canadian labour market declined from 32% to 9% from 1976 to 2017. Although that development has brought changes in the allocation of tasks within families, inequalities still persist.
As regards parents, according to a 2017 Statistics Canada survey, the distribution of domestic tasks is still gendered and varies with spouses' participation in the labour force and certain characteristics such as type of union and age group.
Some 8.1 million Canadians, one in four Canadians aged 15 and over, were informal caregivers in 2012. Of that number, 46% were men and 54% women. In that same year, the number of hours during which those individuals provided care was equal to the number of hours worked in 1.2 million full-time positions.
What can we say about the amount of unpaid work performed since the pandemic began? According to the Canadian Research Institute for the Advancement of Women, women are still the main providers of unpaid work within the family, even where they are still working outside the home during the pandemic. If they are teleworking, they must juggle both paid and unpaid work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Some task-sharing is possible in certain families where a spouse is present, but all work falls to one and the same person in single-parent families.
Informal caregivers who provide care and services in a person's home, or who live with that person, have become doubly invisible as a result of what has occurred in long-term care facilities and private residences. And yet these individuals work in the homes of family members in need every day. More than 80% of seniors live in their homes or with a caregiver. We therefore need to form a clear idea of all the work these informal caregivers do and of the impact the pandemic has had on them and on those they help.
As regards the recognition of invisible work, in 1970, the Bird commission analyzed the unpaid work done by women in the home and those in the workplace. At the first UN conference on the status of women, in 1975, recognition of invisible work was front and centre in the discussions. Over the years, Canada and the other UN member countries have undertaken to value and record that work and to include it in their GDP. In 1995, the UN valued all unpaid work performed by women and girls around the world at $11 trillion U.S. In 2020, Oxfam reported a value of $10.8 trillion U.S., roughly the same figure.
In Canada, it is essential that Statistics Canada assess and include the monetary value of unpaid work in our GDP every five years. It should also expand its analysis of the invisible work performed by families and informal caregivers by adding the number of hours per task and per responsibility, direct and indirect costs and their impact on the finances and health of the individuals who perform that work. This will make it easier to assess what social, physical and economic measures may be needed.
Thank you for listening.