Status of Women committee  I get to answer the question everybody always has: What is the current state of gender equality in Canada? Prior to budget 2018, we had a GBA+ action plan, but there was something missing. What was missing was a framework for guiding us in our action on gender equality, what our

Status of Women committee  Sure. I'm just pulling up some statistics here, but unfortunately, I don't have any further breakdown in terms of the cultural reasons that women might drop out. However, when we look at visible minority women, they account for 81.8% of the visible minority population who complet

Status of Women committee  There are a number of indices globally that we look at in terms of Canada's ranking relative to other countries. I caution you in looking at these indices, because it is relative, so if another country moves up, we move down, even if we've done the same amount of work. When we lo

Status of Women committee  I would add that engaging men and boys is absolutely critical if we're going to shift the culture, and we have to shift the culture in order to achieve some of these indicators on gender equality. I'll point out two things that already have come up here. Yes, we need to encourag

Status of Women committee  One area that I would point to is the gender pay gap. We did a lot of work during the last mandate on understanding the gender pay gap. What we need to do now is to address the factors associated with the gender pay gap. They are things like the care work and family leave and thi

Status of Women committee  In terms of the global budget, I think that's a question that would be better answered by Global Affairs Canada. It certainly isn't my area of expertise since it's global. I am focused more on domestic, so I think it's a better question for Global Affairs officials.

Status of Women committee  This would be the purview of ESDC, so they'd be in a better position to talk about the progress on those initiatives. What I can say is that we worked very closely with ESDC in the early stages of this, providing technical expertise and our research. We continue to do so as they

Status of Women committee  Just to add to that, going back to the sexual health education, within the federal government the Public Health Agency of Canada leads on this piece. We recently provided technical advice and guidance on the Canadian guidelines for sexual health education that have now been relea

Status of Women committee  When we developed the gender results framework, we did a really comprehensive scan of what was going on in Canada and where we were seeing gaps in gender equality. We also worked with international partners and took a look at international models and frameworks and distilled all

Status of Women committee  The majority of our statistics come from databases held by Statistics Canada. They compile quite a number of data sources, such as labour force participation and tax holdings. They bring that all together. That's where we get our data.

Status of Women committee  I'd have to look into what data is available to disaggregate by. The difficulty with data is that sometimes when you drill down into certain groups they're so small that numbers can't be released. I'd have to go back and verify what we can and cannot provide. One thing you menti

Status of Women committee  The barriers are so complex, and perhaps different for each of those groups. While we don't like to think about it, some of those barriers are unconscious or conscious bias, so we have to shift the culture, shift cultural attitudes towards certain groups. We also need to create

Status of Women committee  I do have a bit of data in front of me. When we take a look at, for example, labour force participation, we see that women's labour force participation is slightly lower for immigrant women than for other women in Canada. It's the same for immigrant men's labour force participati

Status of Women committee  Over the past few years we've invested tens of millions of dollars in getting new data. With budget 2016 we invested $1.5 million per year to get the data needed for GBA+. With our GBV strategy we invested over $30 million in data, and then with budget 2018, another $5 million in

Status of Women committee  In terms of data on a whole related to gender, there were pockets of data. What I can say is, prior to 2015 there was no focus to...research team at Status of Women to shepherd this data collection.