At risk: A generation of gains
A recession led by women’s job losses during the pandemic threatens to wipe out decades of economic and social achievements. But advocates say newly rebooted ideas, like universal child care, could provide a way forward
Working mother Stephenie Summerhill believed she had it all — until COVID-19.
And now, like millions of Canadian women who have been locked down at home with children for the past three months — and counting — she wonders if she will ever get her life back.
“I was born in 1977, the first generation of women who were raised for careers,” she says. “I prefer to work.”
But when her boss phones as her threeyear-old is calling for help in the bathroom, “who do you choose?” asks Summerhill, 42, who suddenly found herself juggling her high-powered job in the non-profit sector with two sons under age six.
“I was trying to do a good job at work and trying to do a good job at home. And I was not doing a good job at either,” she says.
On April 24, she threw in the towel and took an unpaid leave.
She and her husband, a lawyer for a construction company, agreed she would be the one to step back from her career because he is the higher income earner.
“Unfortunately, it really comes down to who makes more money,” says Summerhill. “And it’s usually the men.”
As Canadian employment figures have confirmed, women were the first to lose their jobs when the country shut down in mid-March, accounting for almost 62 per cent of the newly unemployed. In May, as many provinces began to reopen, men were the first to return to work, gaining back jobs at roughly twice the rate of women, according to Statistics Canada.
The unprecedented fallout — a recession led by women’s job losses when tourism, restaurants and shops were shuttered to prevent the spread of COVID-19 — threatens to wipe out a generation of women’s economic and social gains.
Policy-makers of all political stripes, from Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to Ontario Progressive Conservative Premier Doug Ford, have acknowledged the need to support women and women’s employment as the country slowly reopens.
Many economists say that means turning women’s marginal employment in the so-called “caring economy” into good jobs with higher wages and better working conditions.
It also means getting serious about creating a pan-Canadian system of high-quality, universally accessible, affordable child care, a long-standing barrier to women’s employment and economic equity.
As economist Armine Yalnizyan has been saying for more than a month: “No recovery without a ‘she-covery.’ And no ‘she-covery’ without child care.”
But academics and women’s advocates say it will take more than catchy phrases to ensure patriarchy — the male-dominated status quo — and outright misogyny — hatred or prejudice against women and girls — don’t thwart the “she-covery” in the wake of COVID-19.
“It’s important for us to recognize that the concepts of patriarchy and misogyny that play out on a day-to-day basis, are not particularly visible or dramatic,” says Andrea Gunraj, vice-president of public engagement with the Canadian Women’s Foundation, the country’s only public foundation dedicated to women and girls.
Rather, these concepts are embedded in the way our societies are structured and in how we value and fund things, she says.
“Many people are challenging us to look at racism in the same systemic way,” she notes.
Along with housework, the caring work women do in the home for children and elders is largely unpaid, Gunraj says. The undervaluing of this work continues outside the home in child care, personal support and seniors’ care.
The goal of the foundation and women’s advocates is to eliminate patriarchy and misogyny by using a gender-based analysis of policy and funding decisions that also includes “intersectionality,” or the interplay of race, culture, age, education, disability and other identities, Gunraj says. “What we have seen is that the pandemic has deepened inequalities that were already there,” she says. “The same folks that were already on the margins are being pushed over the line.”
Trudeau, the first prime minister to ensure women MPs make up 50 per cent of his cabinet, has made so-called Gender-based Analysis Plus (GBA+) a signature policy of his government.
“COVID-19 is a crisis unlike any other,” says a spokesperson for Maryam Monsef, federal minister for women and gender equality.
“It has hit women hardest with jobs lost and women taking on more unpaid work than they already were for their kids as well as their elders,” says Marie-Pier Baril.
“Women are the majority of those on the front lines of the fight against COVID. That includes nurses, of course, but also personal support workers, other health-care workers, child-care workers, food-sector workers and social workers.”
Ottawa is committed to applying a GBA+ lens to its COVID-19 emergency response measures and recovery efforts, she says.
Data and evidence will be crucial, advocates say.
“The discussions I have had with parents is that, because the female parent earns less, she is the one who has quit her job or is staying home now because there is no child care or it is unaffordable,” says Julia Smith, a research associate in the health sciences faculty at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia.
Smith has just received a $500,000 Canadian Institutes of Health Research grant to colead an international study on the gender impact of COVID-19. The study is the first of its kind to look at the impact of pandemics on women and will include case studies in Canada, the United Kingdom, Hong Kong and China.
“Women have told me quite candidly that, when it comes to making these decisions, it’s just assumed by their partners, by their families, by the people they work with, that they will be the ones who give up work,” adds Smith, whose team has identified child care as an early ask.
Another area Smith would target for more public support is the non-profit sector, which is not only dominated by female workers, but provides important social services that support them.
Although it is a two-year research project, Smith and her team are posting preliminary findings on a website in an attempt to effect decision-making now. “I am quite encouraged by the response at the federal, provincial and municipal level here in Canada,” she says. “People want to know what the impacts are for various groups and really want to tailor their response accordingly.”
But, too often, cost becomes a major stumbling block to advancing women’s equality.
For example, after Kathleen Wynne’s Liberal government in 2018 committed to build a universal child-care system in Ontario by introducing free daycare for children two and three years old, Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservatives axed the $2.2-billion program as part of his plan to slay the provincial deficit once they took power.
With Ottawa’s pandemic deficit expected to crest $250 billion, there will be calls to rein in spending, says economist Lindsay Tedds, an associate professor at the University of Calgary’s School of Public Policy.
But fighting deficits through austerity is “just the patriarchy being the patriarchy,” she says. “Austerity constricts and constrains economic growth.”
Targeted government spending is a much better way to grow the economy out of deficit, she argues. And, instead of viewing spending as a cost, governments need to see the benefits.
Twenty years of research in Quebec shows spending on child care is especially beneficial, returning $5 to the province’s economic bottom line for every $1 invested through the ripple effect of more women earning, spending and paying taxes, Tedds says.
That doesn’t include the positive impact on child development and poverty reduction.
“If people say we can’t afford to pay for (child care), I’m saying, we can’t afford not to. It almost costs less — if you do it right,” she adds.
Child care is also essential to addressing the gender-pay gap, says Tedds, who notes European research shows men and women earn essentially the same until women begin taking time off work to have children. “And they never recover,” she says. In 2018, Canadian women earned an average of 87 cents for every dollar earned by men.
But, as Tedds and other academics argue, Canada also needs to improve the wages and poor working conditions of women in the caring economy.
“If we get more child care only to enable women to go back to jobs where they earn considerably less than men, then that’s inadequate,” says University of Manitoba sociology professor Susan Prentice.
“I am very heartened by the degree to which the gendered aspect of this economic crisis is being addressed,” says Prentice, who wrote her PhD thesis on women’s fight to keep wartime daycares open after the Second World War. “But it’s got to tip into action.” Toronto Coun. Joe Cressy, whose baby Jude was born just four months before the city went into lockdown, was instrumental in arranging free emergency child care for essential workers at the end of March. He says the model is one the province should emulate for all Ontario families.
“Here you have a singular moment where the provision of free child care for front-line workers — which has enabled us to withstand this pandemic — showed us a better path forward,” he says.
And yet with the province’s announcement earlier this month that child care would reopen with regular parent fees “we are immediately going back to what existed before, but worse.”
“While there is a lot of excitement about the possibility of building a new and better normal, with each passing day in this province, it feels like we are going back to the status quo,” he says. “There is no better example of that than child care.”
One of the problems with child care is that no one level of government is responsible, Cressy says.
“Why is it so complicated to explain funding related to child care? Why is it so complicated to explain service agreements and the role of the province and the cities and the feds?
“Everybody can always point their fingers at someone else. It’s failure by design,” he adds.
To end the finger-pointing, Cressy thinks Ottawa needs to create a Canada Child Care Act, similar to the Canada Health Act that sets out a funding framework with principles to guide the provision of universal health care. If Ottawa funds it properly, provinces won’t be able to afford to say no, he adds.
Lawyer Kathleen Lahey, a gender equity scholar and Queen’s University Law School professor, says she hopes more men emerge from the pandemic with a clearer understanding of what raising children involves and get behind the push for more child care.
But child care would be just a start, she argues, noting more women in gender-neutral Norway work part-time than anywhere else in Europe, despite the country’s highly regarded universal child-care system.
“Why? Patriarchy raises its head. Because the norm is that women take care of kids. It’s these really deep structural things that have to change,” she says.
“But they can change. People are working on it all around the world,” adds Lahey, who is involved in several international research projects on women’s equality.
Some advocates are focused on addressing the unequal sharing of housework and child rearing in the home and starting to empower women there, she says.
“Some people are saying, let’s rip the lid off ... income inequality. Others are looking at gender equality from an (environmental) perspective. And some are tackling it as part of the antipoverty movement,” she says.
Increasingly, these large groups are converging.
“Women’s equality is increasingly understood to be ... an intersectional movement where if you don’t bring in everyone who needs a better life, then you aren’t going to make it.
“It’s going to be all groups together seeing what patriarchy and concentration of wealth has done to governments and to more vulnerable groups,” she adds.
Since leaving her job, Summerhill has poured herself into making life livable. She has set up Lego tables and crafts in the living room for her sons and has created a “kids’ paradise” in the backyard with a sandbox, water table and slide off the deck.
Her fear, however, is that she doesn’t know how long the lockdown will go on, if her daycare and school will reopen, if her job will still be there and if she will be able to go back to work under whatever the “new normal” looks like.
“At what point do I get to think about me again? At 50? I’m really struggling,” she says, her voice catching with emotion.
“My husband is trying to be supportive. But I’m just angry.”
WOMEN from A1