Status of Women committee  After 20 years of doing it, I am used to it. The other question we sometimes get is this: where's the report on men? We do react to demand at Statistics Canada, and at this point in time there does not seem to be a great demand for that kind of thing; however, in doing this report, every statistic in here has a male component to it.

Status of Women committee  For the moment I've blanked out. It's in my notes here, and I'll dig it out. I'm sure we'll come to it during the course of the morning.

Status of Women committee  I'm not totally an expert in that area, and somebody else wrote that chapter, but my understanding is that the assumption is that most of that difference is accounted for by birth rates but some of it may be accounted for by changes in identification.

Status of Women committee  Well, first of all, I'm talking for myself. The Women in Canada report itself is one of a series of reports that we do on a whole bunch of groups. In particular this report gets used as a kind of report card for the status of women, but that's really not its main purpose. The main purpose of this report is to provide people across the country, who are working and studying in the area of gender statistics, with an on-shelf database.

Status of Women committee  Yes, in fact, part of my presentation was to mention the statistic you asked about initially, and for some reason I had forgotten. In fact, yes, the serious issue here is that female-headed lone-parent families account for a very disproportionate share of all children with families.

Status of Women committee  Well, it's certainly a question. Why those 35% are not working is a very good question. They may simply choose to stay at home, and say, “I'd rather be at home with my children.” That's a possibility. Or there are other barriers to their being in the workforce. And again, that would certainly be a question.

Status of Women committee  The same kinds of numbers, yes.

Status of Women committee  Again, I apologize, because my French is not good enough to answer your questions. I think you're absolutely right. As I said, we did not get into the reasons why these things happen. Certainly, one of the surprising conclusions we came to in this report was that we did not see a further evolution of the occupational distribution of women.

Status of Women committee  That would go to my colleague Ms. Mihorean, who is the expert in that regard.

Status of Women committee  If you look at the immigrant and visible minority populations, women do make less on average in those two subpopulations than those in the overall population. Obviously there is a lot of overlap between the immigrant population and the visible minority population. However, if you look at immigrant women, and I believe also visible minority women who arrived in Canada before the 1990s, their statistical profile is very similar to that of the native-born population.

Status of Women committee  I didn't quite get the question.

Status of Women committee  Again, when you look at immigrant women who arrived in Canada before 1990, their statistical profile--that is, the employment rate, the low-income rate, things like that--is very similar to that of the native-born population. It's only when you look at women who've arrived within the last decade that you do see some differences, and fairly wide differences.

Status of Women committee  No. It's possible, but I didn't say that. Certainly that is not a result of Women in Canada.

Status of Women committee  No. First of all, the Women in Canada report was really intended largely to be an on-shelf database for women and men, people across the country, working in the areas of gender, and studying and working in those areas. We have 300 or 400 series in the publication, so there really wasn't time to look at the reasons for why these trends were happening.

Status of Women committee  Bonjour, good morning. First of all, I would like to thank the committee for the opportunity to present this material this morning. A great deal of very hard work and effort went into the preparation of the Women in Canada report. It's very gratifying to the whole staff who was involved in the report to know that it's being well used and particularly being used in an environment such as this one.