I would like to thank the committee for this opportunity to share with you the findings of our research on this topic.
We hope it will contribute to transformative policies in Canada, as the leading champion for gender equality at home and in foreign policy.
You have some slides that I prepared. I prepared a presentation of more than five minutes, so I will try to summarize to complement the beautiful presentation that Ms. Neapole just shared.
The report uses a comprehensive definition of care work including unpaid activities for the household and the community, and paid work that we define as care employment, which is care workers providing care work for pay or profit.
The innovation of this report is that we tried to analyze how unpaid work impacts gender equality in the labour market. Learning more about and measuring unpaid care work can tell us about the persisting and stubborn gender inequality at work and how to address it.
What's really innovative is that the concept of unpaid care work is based on a new international labour standard that typifies unpaid caregiving and domestic services for household and family members as a new form of work. This is from the ILO. Unpaid care work is work. It represents a crucial dimension in the world of work. What we measure matters. It's part of this process that we want to further recognize its value and make unpaid care work a key part of decision-making.
The ILO has made estimates of the extent of unpaid care work. It represents 16.4 billion hours, which is equivalent to two billion people working eight hours per day with no remuneration. We gave a value to this work and applied methodologies that would pay this work an hourly minimum wage. It would represent 9% of the GDP globally and 26% of the GDP in Canada, with women making up almost two-thirds of the total unpaid hours.
We find there has been some progress in men's contribution to unpaid care work. Actually, Canada is performing relatively well compared to the countries for which we have data. Men's contribution has been improving, but based on labour force survey data in 2010, there is still a 10% gender gap in unpaid care work. Effort is still needed there.
The persisting inequalities in unpaid care work have direct impacts on inequality in the labour market. We also found that unpaid care work is the main barrier to women's participation in the labour market globally.
Also, there is an employment penalty for mothers living with young children. We can look at the situation in Canada to see there is still what we call the parenthood employment gap, which is the difference between the employment-to-population ratios of mothers and fathers. This gap was still 20 percentage points in 2018. Meanwhile, the gap is only four percentage points for women and men who live without young children. As we heard already, this results in a motherhood pay penalty, which directly impacts the gender pay gap. There is also a leadership penalty, with mothers being under-represented in the number of managers and leaders. Meanwhile, we see a consistent fatherhood premium in employment, wages and leadership.
One important result of the process which, in 2019, culminated in the adoption of the ILO centenary declaration for the future of work was a call for investing in the care economy. It means putting public and private investment in transformative care policies. This pays off in terms of labour force participation, health—