Status of Women committee  I think we need a host of affirmative action strategies in order to make a difference. Just as we do in pay, we need positive action. Some of those can be targeted at particular kinds of numbers, although, when we do numbers, they tend to be the maximum rather than the minimum th

Status of Women committee  I think one factor is the higher value we place on the so-called hard sciences versus the soft sciences. We attach more value to areas that can be what we think of as objectively measured than to those that can't, areas where we think it costs a lot more money to do the research

Status of Women committee  The answer is yes. There's a study out of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives that quite clearly demonstrates the difference in access to universal child care in Quebec, with its $7-a-day program, versus what happens in the rest of the country, or in Toronto where I am, w

Status of Women committee  There have been a couple of studies indicating that there is a connection. In Alberta, for instance, there was a survey done that said 46% of the women who worked part-time worked part-time because they didn't have access to affordable child care, just as one example, and that's

Status of Women committee  What are other factors that make women's employment different in other regions? Well, there are the opportunities for employment, and I think the extent to which we have equity practices. Not all provinces, of course, have proactive pay equity legislation, for example. Not all pr

Status of Women committee  There has been a persistent pay gap. This is one area in which I have worked for a long time and on which I have been an expert witness in various ways to show that the gap has not narrowed very much, and that sometimes when it has narrowed, it has narrowed only because men's inc

Status of Women committee  Sorry—what has impacted them?

Status of Women committee  My apologies. I didn't understand what the question was. We're starting to get numbers. Statistics Canada cancelled the data collection that was useful to us in the past. It's going to start that survey again, which will help us a great deal. Some universities, like my own, have

Status of Women committee  As we heard from Ms. Howard as well, the 700 hours in high-employment areas like Ontario, for instance, would exclude a lot of part-time people. The other issue in the universities, related to this question of basing it on hours, is what hours get counted when you teach? If there

Status of Women committee  There are many reasons. One of them is that they don't have adequate child care. Many women, because they lack alternative supports, especially in academia, get trapped in that contract work. That's one part. The other part is that we simply don't have enough jobs in the areas w

Status of Women committee  Yes.

Status of Women committee  There's no reason to think it has to be one size fits all. We do it in health care; we set up some standards and principles. That's what we can do, and then we can let particular communities, such as indigenous communities in urban and rural areas, or such as universities, set up

Status of Women committee  I don't think you need to have one-size-fits-all in order to say that we have universal accessible child care. We have universal accessible access to doctor and hospital care without having that uniform across the country, including in rural areas. I think that small universiti

Status of Women committee  I think there are very important recommendations in the task force report that address some of these issues. I've served on many committees, both in the Canadian Institutes for Health Research and in the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, and training researchers' e

Status of Women committee  I think it's important to encourage partnerships. Also, a number of CAUT reports as well as the task force suggest that we should be valuing research that is done with communities, as opposed to much more traditional kinds of academic research, and that we should be involving com