Gender equity: There’s cause for hope

Federal budget is a real step toward closing the gap, Kate McInturff writes.

Men and women are different. That shouldn’t be news, but Wednesday, it was. Wednesday, the government released the first federal budget that includes a look at the differences between men and women. Differences like the fact that women are twice as likely to work part-time, work in different occupations than are men, and are more likely to be the victims of a violent crime.

For public spending to be effective, we need policies and programs that respond to those differences. More targeted policy is more effective policy. Otherwise we could just divide up the budget by 37 million Canadians and send everyone a cheque.

Narrowing the gender gap benefits everyone. Women make up 47 per cent of our labour force. Nearly one million women are working part-time right now for involuntary reasons — reasons such as that they can’t find childcare. When more women work more hours, they earn more money, they spend more money, they pay more taxes, and they invest in their families and their communities.

The 2017 budget does a very good job of providing analysis of how measures in the 2016 budget reduced poverty among single mothers and senior women. It gives concrete breakdowns of how income transfers like the Child Benefit affect women and men differently. This is good work. But this is a look back at the greatest gender hits of 2016.

There is some good news to found in budget 2017. Not groundbreaking. Not lifechanging. But welcome.

The government will spend $100.9 million over five years to establish a National Strategy to Address Gender-Based Violence. That’s about $20 million a year. To address a problem that currently costs our economy $12 billion a year, according to Justice Canada.

There is $3.6 million over three years to establish an LGBTQ2 Secretariat and support the work of the prime minister’s special adviser on LGBTQ2 issues.

There is $40 million for women-led technology firms. That’s more than the annual budget of Status of Women Canada, the department tasked with making sure all this gender-based analysis happens.

Finally, there is $7 billion over 10 years to increase access to affordable childcare. This is a huge issue for women and for our economy. Affordable childcare is one the biggest barriers to women’s employment. Increased access to paid work is important for women, it’s important for their families and it is a significant driver of economic growth. So when the International Monetary Fund came to town last year to evaluate Canada’s economy, what did they want to talk about? Childcare.

So far, so good. Here’s the trickier part.

There are some very big investments here in technology, science and all things innovative. The government points out that women comprise only 19 per cent of those currently working in those sectors. Sad face. It invests billions in research and innovation. Happy face. And the measures that would ensure women benefit from more than 19 per cent of that? The benchmarks for narrowing the gap between men and women working in this highpaying and growing occupational sector? Not so much detail there. Actually, none.

In general, there are no specific benchmarks for narrowing the wage gap, increasing women’s employment or lowering rates of violence. The six economic sectors identified as the budget’s priorities are all predominantly male employment sectors. There are no parallel investments in predominantly female employment sectors.

Support for unpaid care work is delivered through a tax break — which many female caregivers will not qualify for, because they don’t have the time left to do enough paid work to raise their incomes to a level that would qualify them for that break. Further supports to caregivers and new parents are delivered through the Employment Insurance program, which many women don’t qualify for because they tend to work part-time, because they do more unpaid caregiving work.

The government’s commitment to do this analysis is something to celebrate. This year’s budget is an important first step toward better policies for Canadians and better lives for women.

There is one sentence in the 2017 federal budget that gives me more cause for optimism than anything else. It is this: “More than 60 Budget 2017 measures were identified as having differential gender impacts, but there remain many areas where data is not readily available.” That is the sound of Finance Canada asking questions that it has never asked before. That is the sound of our government realizing how much more it needs to know before it can deliver real change for women in Canada. That is a cause for hope. See you in 2018. Kate McInturff is a senior researcher at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.