Status of Women committee  Yes.

Status of Women committee  It's really not for me as a South African to say, but maybe the issue is to say, what are the big issues that are really contributing most to gender inequality in Canada? What I've been hearing from listening for the last little while is that one is the unpaid care work. So one might want to ask what programs do currently or could potentially lighten that burden or get that burden shared.

Status of Women committee  Thank you for inviting me.

Status of Women committee  Certainly. I talk about the five steps of gender budgeting, and the first step is a situation analysis to say what is the position of women, men, girls, and boys in a particular country in relation to education, employment, health, or whatever you want to name it. When one does that, it's not simply women and men, girls and boys, but in my country it's black women, black men, white women, and it's rich and poor.

Status of Women committee  This is one of my pet topics, so I don't want to get started at half past midnight. But I'm really pleased that this issue has been raised, because I think it's essential if one wants a gender-responsive budget and if one wants gender equality. I think the unequal burden that women around the world bear in terms of unpaid care work underlies a whole lot of the inequalities.

Status of Women committee  Yes. There is only one point I want to make. I've been a bit intrigued with the last few questions about the focus on the Department of Finance. I don't understand how the Canadian system works, but I would be surprised if in Canada the line agencies don't have quite a lot of control over how their budget is framed.

Status of Women committee  If I could just try on that question, I think what Ms. Beckton has just said is...though the important words were, if they have done “the analysis” of the situation of this and “the resource allocation”. As soon as she says “the resource allocation”, she's talking about gender-responsive budgeting.

Status of Women committee  My answer to the last one is no. I don't think there's any recipe for gender budgeting. I really do think it's got to be designed to take into account the political situation in the country, the method of budgeting, what has been done before, what are the various processes. I do think the lessons show that it's something that happens slowly; it's not something that happens overnight.

Status of Women committee  One way of doing that is to include it in the budget format. So in the budget format you need to have sex-disaggregated data, certain tables, and a special section that considers the gender issues. Several countries, in their budgets, have circulars that go out each year with specific instructions about including gender and how it must be done to fit into their format.

Status of Women committee  I've done this in other countries as well. What it reveals also is the state of the government officials' understanding of gender issues. How they present what they think the problems are and what they think the solutions are that they are delivering gives you an insight into their perceptions and where maybe Status of Women needs to go in to give a little bit of assistance.

Status of Women committee  I certainly have one of the reports in electronic form. I think it's a public document. France, together with its budget, has a state of documents jaunes, yellow books, and one of these yellow books is the report on gender.

Status of Women committee  I think it's a public document. I don't know to what extent it influences policy. I think, a bit like the South African one, it's saying, this is what we are doing. But my hypothesis is that if government officials have to write these sorts of things, saying this is what we're doing and this is how it contributes to gender equality, that can influence policy because people become more aware of what they're doing.

Status of Women committee  I don't think there are real differences between the terms. Usually people are using these terms to refer to the same thing. In South Africa we use the term “women's budget” because we have 11 official languages, and only one of those languages, which is English, has the word “gender” in it.

Status of Women committee  Yes. First, when I said that we looked at every single program, that was the analysis we did from outside, more or less, as Parliament and the NGOs. And we did everything, and that was on existing programs. The approach I'm talking about now, which is done in the Western Cape and the Gauteng Province, is done by the civil servants themselves, and it is again every single department having to choose certain programs.

Status of Women committee  On the review of the Commonwealth thing, I think what Ms. Beckton added was very helpful and was what in fact I suspected. To be honest, the report from Canada, as were the reports from many of the other countries, sounded a little too rosy to me. I've learned to be a cynic over 10 or more years of doing this work.