Status of Women committee  Thank you, Madam Chair and committee members, for the opportunity to speak to this committee today about the economic leadership and prosperity of women in Canada. My name is Kate McInturff. I am a senior researcher at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. Today more wom

Status of Women committee  One of the things I hear about from industries, from women working across the country, and indeed, from economists is the need for affordable child care. This is a huge barrier for women in every sector across the country. We have, happily, in Quebec's program, an example of ho

Status of Women committee  Thank you. In addition to child care, I would echo what Alex has said about the fact that we need to keep track of how we're paying and promoting men and women. It is clear, as Alex's examples demonstrated, that we cannot address, for example, inequities in pay if we don't know

Status of Women committee  Sure. Briefly looking at Calgary and Edmonton, what we see is a very segregated workforce. Not only do women tend to work in education, health care, and the service sector, but in those Alberta cities, women tend to work in the lowest paid of those female-dominated sectors, whic

Status of Women committee  Income splitting is not something that is going to benefit the families that need it most. It is essentially an upside-down benefit, so the wealthiest families reap the greatest rewards. I think there are many ways that we could better spend the billions of dollars that an income

Status of Women committee  Absolutely. The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives is a public policy think tank. We have a national office, as well as several provincial offices. I joined the national office a little over a year ago as part of this new initiative called Making Women Count, which is aimed

Status of Women committee  I think there are a number of reasons. One is that even earlier than the university level, at the secondary level, in high school, we see girls tending to move away from the math and science classes that they would need as prerequisites to go into those male-dominated fields like

Status of Women committee  Good question. That was the median employment incomes for elementary school teachers, so it's not taking into account differences in the number of hours worked. What I would suspect is that the reason for the $10,000-a-year gap in salaries would have to do with that problem of

Status of Women committee  Thank you for that. Two things: one, I am aware, obviously, that other programs, departments, and agencies spend money on programs that impact women's lives. I have looked at, in particular, federal spending broadly across all departments on violence against women. What I found

Status of Women committee  Do I have any time?

Status of Women committee  Yes. The second point is that there was an Auditor General's report on the extent to which the government is not, in fact, conducting gender-based analysis of the impacts of its programs. Although there's been an action plan put in place in response to that, the only thing that's

Status of Women committee  Sure. At the risk of repeating what Alex has said, I think one of the things that unions, and indeed any employer, can do to close the wage gap is to actually track what's happening rather than relying on anecdotal evidence. This happens to be something that unions and public sec

Status of Women committee  Well, partly it's an open question. I was interested to see that, and of course I welcome any investment in women's economic well-being, and this is certainly a welcome initiative. If we look at the financial statements of Status of Women Canada, it appears that their financial

Status of Women committee  Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you to the committee for the invitation to speak today. My name is Kate Mclnturff. I'm a senior researcher at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. The committee has already heard that women are highly under-represented in most STEM fields

Status of Women committee  Thank you for the question. The 65¢ is specifically for the oil and gas industry. As I mentioned with, say, construction or engineering, it's different but it is there and it is in the order of 20% to 30% less for those working full time, full year. In terms of the data that we