From hellhole to gendercare

establish standards to measure the “value” of different kinds of work and set equal-value salaries of all employees based on a bureaucratic analysis of all the inputs, outputs and whatever subjective determinants of value they can imagine. Never mind the market. Are federal MPs of equal “value” to airline pilots? Are CBC anchorpersons and bank executives of equal “value”?

Businesses in Canada are overwhelmingly owned by men” — as the budget whines — is presented as an indicator of systemic genderism that’s just crying out for the government to correct. And how about the fact that Canadian women devote approximately four hours a day to unpaid household work, compared with about three hours for Canadian men, which the budget says means women suffer from “the demands of unpaid work.”

And then there’s the wage gap. Women are said to earn 69 cents for every dollar earned by men “on an annual basis,” a ridiculously distorting measure. As others have noted, the average hourly wage — a more accurate indicator — for women is now up to 87 per cent of men. The budget also notes that women are under-represented in positions of leadership. “Though they account for nearly half of the Canadian workforce, only a third of senior managers and one in 20 chief executive officers are women.” That’s another problem that government can apparently solve.

Through dozens of bits of legislation, initiatives, programs, strategies, incentives and financial benefits the government aims to fix all gender wrongs and inequities — real, perceived and imagined.

Justification for the sweeping economy-wide gender interventions comes from various claims that doing so will create more economic growth. “Simply put when women have the support and opportunities they need to fully contribute to Canada’s economy, the entire economy does better — today, and well into the future,” according to the document.

To help support that conclusion, the budget referred to a couple of reports, including one from the Washington-based Peterson Institute for International Economics. The budget said the institute found that “increasing the share of women in leadership positions from zero to 30 per cent translated into a 15 per cent boost in profits — that’s more money for businesses to invest in new jobs that will benefit more people.”

The same misleading words were used by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau during his World Economic Forum talk in January. The Peterson report, however, was somewhat less categorical than the budget’s claim that more women execs would “translate” into better performance. It merely said a move from zero to 30 per cent female leadership is statistically “associated with” 15 per cent higher profitability.

The study did not claim evidence of cause and effect. Instead, it said the robustness of the results “warrants further study.” The estimated gain, moreover, “may well diminish over time… and is surely subject to diminishing returns.” The results should be “interpreted cautiously.”

In other words, there’s not enough here to warrant action by government or business on executive leadership. The Peterson study also concluded, among other things, that “the evidence on the impact of female board membership on firm performance is not robust.”

Academic criticisms of consultants’ and institutional gender studies have been noted in this space before as products of policy-based evidence making. But more importantly, Canada is not a misogynist military or religious dictatorship where half the population is locked out of the labour force. Gendercare will not liberate millions of women out of unproductive servitude into growth-generating occupations. Canadian women are already free and productive.