Of course, I can speak only from my own experience in my rural community, but, as I said before, we have only a handful of places to work right now: a convenience store, a bar, and the town hall. There are very few positions, so having more jobs particularly for women would be favourable. Oftentimes we know that women are the ones who are expected to stay home and take care of young children. They are the ones who are expected to be there when the kids get off the bus and, on top of that, they're often responsible for all of those household duties like cooking and cleaning and helping with homework and those kinds of things.
Given that, when women have to take on those responsibilities, having work that is flexible is no doubt a really big thing. Where my mind goes with that question, of course, is right back to the Internet. If we have stable Internet access in our rural communities, women are able to work from home.
The pandemic has proven just how many industries and how many kinds of jobs can be adapted to an at-home online environment. Further to that, there are lots of women, especially in small communities like my own, who have taken action to begin their own small businesses. Whether it be selling beauty products they have made themselves or selling crafts or offering a service, they are doing these things from home, more and more, of course, with the onset of the pandemic.
That brings us to what Traci has been discussing throughout the duration of our conversation today, which is, of course, child care. If we have women who are able to work from home because they have, say, Internet access that is stable and reliable, they now need someone to watch their children while they are working from home. I am sure many of you have experienced what it's like to try to get your work done from home with children under your feet or pets or someone getting hurt or fights breaking out between the two children. My own mom struggled with that. We're both grown adults, and she still had a hard time working from home at the beginning of the pandemic.
Having child care options available—whether that means somebody coming into your home or your children going to somebody else's home, or maybe there's a centre or a community centre they are going to—goes right back to flexibility and having options, because life is different for everybody. Everyone's circumstances are different and, of course, in rural communities things look vastly different than they do in larger urban centres.
Everything goes back to Internet and flexibility.