EXCERPTS:
Can't think of what to get mom for Mother's Day? How about a fairer wage and a break from household chores and child-care responsibilities?
In recent years the focus has been on statistics showing women outperforming men in school, graduating in greater numbers than men from university and increasingly becoming the primary breadwinners in their families. So it is easy to forget that women in Canada still earn on average 25 per cent less than men do and do the bulk of housework and child care, according to the most recent figures from Statistics Canada.
"The gender division of labour has been there a very long time; it's evolving, but it's evolving very slowly," says Diane-Gabrielle Tremblay, a professor of labour economics, innovation and human resources management at the University of Quebec in Montreal.
"What we're seeing is a rather slow change partly because organizations where people work aren't changing that much."
19th best place for mothers
In Canada, mothers are a significant part of the workforce: 73 per cent of women with children under the age of 16 living at home were employed as of 2009, compared to 39 per cent three decades ago.
"It's one of the highest participation rates of any group, and it's because families can't cope with one income," says Marjorie Griffin Cohen, a political science and women's studies professor at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver.
"We have social services that are arranged around the notion that we have a one-income family, but very few people have income that can pay for an entire family to exist."
The mothers who do work, however, are, on average, paid less for
their labour than their male counterparts and even some of their female
counterparts.
According to the 2010-2011 Statistics Canada survey of women's economic and employment status, women earned only 75 per cent of what men did in 2009, and the wage gap was even greater if all employed men and women — and not just
full-year, full-time workers — were considered: in that larger grouping,
women earned only 69 per cent of what men did.
Women who had children earned between 12 and 20 per cent less than women without children.
This economic inequity helped put Canada behind Portugal, Estonia,
Slovenia and 15 other countries in terms of conditions that make a
country a good place to be a mother. It was ranked 19th out of 43
countries in this year's State of the World's Mothers report, put out annually by the global charity Save the Children.
What's more, it doesn't matter whether women are doctors or sales
clerks, their income disadvantage in Canada extends across professions,
with women in medicine and health-related jobs as well as women in sales
and service industries earning around 57 per cent of what men in those
occupations do, according to the Statistics Canada report.
Women in business and finance fare only slightly better, earning 59 cents for every $1 their male counterparts make.
The most gender parity in income exists in arts, culture, recreation,
teaching and natural sciences. In those areas, women earned 83 per cent
to 85 per cent as much as men.
Women predominate in part-time, low-wage work
And while women may have had an easier time than men
during the recent recession, the fact is that what insulated them from
the kind of job losses men experienced in sectors such as manufacturing,
natural resources and construction was that they hold more of the kind
of low-wage, service and part-time jobs that were not as affected by the
economic slowdown.
Nearly seven out of 10 part-time workers in 2009 were women, according to Statistics Canada.
Many of those women are working part time because of child-care
responsibilities. Among women age 25 to 44 working part time in 2009, 35
per cent said they were doing so in order to care for their children.
Child care responsibilities still fall largely to women, who spend
more than twice the time doing unpaid child care than men, according to 2010 figures from Statistics Canada.
Even when government supports exist to encourage men to do their
share, they don't always do so, it seems. Only 30 per cent of new
fathers made use of the parental leave they were entitled to in 2009, Statistics Canada found.
That was up slightly from 28 per cent the previous year but nowhere
near the 88 per cent of new mothers who drew maternity or parental
benefits.
In Quebec, the rate was much higher since in that province men are
eligible for five weeks of paternity leave, which can only be taken by
the father, on top of whatever other parental leave they might take, and
the wage compensation is more generous than the federal plan.
About 80 per cent of Quebec fathers take paternity leave compared to about 15 per cent in the rest of Canada, Tremblay said.
Tremblay attributes Quebec's higher participation rate in part to the
fact that women's groups, unions and other organizations helped put the
issue of work-life balance on the public agenda more prominently than
in other provinces. (Even before it instituted its own paternity leave
in 2006, Quebec had more fathers who took parental leave than was the
case elsewhere in Canada.)
It's too early to tell whether fathers' involvement in Canada's
parental leave programs will have a long-term impact on the division of
parenting responsibilities, Tremblay said, but the experience in other
countries suggests it might.
"Sweden has had the reserve paternity leave since 1974," Tremblay
said. "Some research there has shown the earlier the father is involved
and the longer he is involved — the longer he stays with the baby — the
more he'll be present over the years after that."
The reluctance of many fathers to take parental leave, says Cohen, is
a product of the economic reality that often makes it easier for a
family to forego the income of the mother rather than the father and the
long-standing stereotypes about gender roles that persist even in
modern, purportedly egalitarian households.
Parenting is still largely a full-time job for a woman and a
part-time job for a man, according to Sheryl Sandberg, the chief
operating officer of Facebook. A married mother of two, she has been
vocal about the need to change the expectations of who does what in the
home.
Sandberg has spoken often about the impact gender stereotypes have on
women's working lives, including in a series of web interviews
accompanying the forthcoming AOL-PBS documentary project Makers: Women Who Make America.
"Go to any party … [where] there are families there with little kids,
watch the baby cry, watch who gets up. It's pretty much almost always
the woman, and when it's not, the man gets this huge praise, 'Oh, my
God, you went to change a diaper,'" Sandberg, a former Google executive
and a chief of staff at the U.S. Treasury Department, says in one of the 30-second video segments on Makers.com.
"We still live in expectations around child rearing — even among very
modern families and very modern couples — that the woman's default [is
being] in charge, and if the women are default in charge, they will
never succeed as much as men do in the workplace."
The double burden
Along with child rearing, women in North American families also do a greater share of the housework.
In Canada, women spent an average of 13.8 hours a week on domestic chores in 2009 versus 8.3 hours for men, Statistics Canada reports.
This skewed division of labour results in what has been dubbed the
"double burden," which not only saddles women with a disproportionate
share of what should be a two-person job but also impedes them in the
workplace, where it can result in women missing out on advancement
opportunities and self-selecting themselves out of assignments and
promotions that would benefit their career.
"The No. 1 impediment to women succeeding in the workforce is now in the home," Sandberg said in a 2010 New Yorker magazine profile.
"Most people assume that women are responsible for households and child
care. Most couples operate that way — not all. That fundamental
assumption holds women back."
Cohen says that for Canadian women, the burden could be eased if
employers and governments provided parents with better, more affordable
child-care options and flexible work arrangements.
"We tend to organize our labour force and our public policy as though
everyone were working full time, full year and didn't have children,"
she said.
"That is something that has not been rectified, and … giving people
$100 a month [the amount of the federal Universal Child Care Benefit]
doesn't go anywhere near dealing with what people truly need in order to
deal with what is a very serious problem: which is how their children
are cared for when they're in the labour force."
Many employers still assume women won't be as invested in their work
after they have children, and they react negatively to male employees
taking time off for family responsibilities, Tremblay said. In her
research, Tremblay interviewed men who said they wanted to take a more
active role in their family life but didn't feel comfortable asking for
time off for family reasons at work.
"The finance sector, the IT sector, multimedia — those are all
sectors where putting forward demands for the family won't necessarily
be perceived very positively, so the men just won't put them forward,"
she said.
Gender divisions still present among professions
Women
are also disadvantaged in the workforce because they remain
concentrated in the same occupations that have been female dominated for
decades, such as teaching, nursing and other health-related jobs, and
clerical, administrative, sales and service work.
Sixty-seven per cent of employed women in Canada were working in
these areas as of 2009, compared to 31 per cent of employed men, the Statistics Canada survey found.
Conversely, in the natural sciences, engineering and mathematics, women made up only 22 per cent of professionals.
The exceptions are business and finance, where the proportion of
women went from 38 per cent in 1987 to 51 per cent in 2009, and some
diagnostic and treating health care professions such as doctors and
dentists, where women's participation went from 43 per cent in 1987 to
55 per cent in 2009.
"We've kind of been lulled into complacency because we see more women
doctors, more women lawyers, but, in fact, what we're seeing at the
middle end and the low end of wage earning … [is] a very stubborn
division of labour by gender," Cohen said.
Women are not well represented in fields such as construction,
trades, transportation, manufacturing and natural resources industries,
and the government has done little to help integrate them into those
parts of the workforce, Cohen said.
A lack of apprenticeship programs means that women are not being
trained for such jobs, and those who have enough training are not being
hired.
As a result, women are losing out on job opportunities in growth
industries where there is a demand for labour, such as the oilsands.
Cohen cites the example of the recession in 2008-09, when governments
poured money into new infrastructure programs as a way to help stimulate
the flagging economy, money that went primarily to jobs for men, not
women.
"You have to have government really seriously instituting programs,"
Cohen said. "It's not just a matter of women applying for a job and
getting one if employers aren't going to hire them, and they aren't
going to hire them unless the government makes them do it when they give
them all the money to build all of this infrastructure."
Corporate boards mostly male
While
the common refrain in recent years has been that women have "made it"
and no longer have to struggle for equality, the reality on the ground
tells a different story.
Nearly a third (31 per cent in 2009, according to Statistics Canada) of women in two-income families may earn more than their husbands, but only a small percentage of them attain the highest levels in their profession.
Women tend to occupy lower-level managerial positions — only 32 per
cent of senior managers were women in 2009, according to the Statistics Canada survey — and make up only a tiny proportion of the boards of directors at Canadian companies.
Even when they are in senior positions, they are generally still
having to juggle more family responsibilities, on top of their added
workload, than their male counterparts, says Tremblay.
"In qualitative interviews with managers — men and women in different
sectors — you do see that the preoccupation with family issues is still
present for women even if they are in a managerial position," she said.
"Whereas for men in those kind of positions, it does not tend to be
very important — usually, there is really somebody else fully
responsible for this."
A mere 14.5 per cent of board seats in private and 10.3 per cent in
public companies on the FP500, the list of Canada's 500 largest private
and public corporations, were held by women in 2011, according to a census conducted by Catalyst,
which tracks women's advancement in business. Almost 40 per cent of
private companies and more than 46 per cent of public companies on the
FP500 had no women at all on their boards.
The numbers are similar in the U.S. and in many parts of the world — except places like Norway, where the government mandated that 40 per cent of seats on corporate boards be held by women and which ranked No.1 on the State of the World's Mothers report.
"Women are not making it to the top of any profession anywhere in the world," Sandberg told an audience at the TEDWomen conference
in December 2010. "A hundred and ninety heads of state; nine are women.
Of all the people in parliament in the world, 13 per cent are women. In
the corporate sector, women at the top — C-level jobs, board seats —
tops out at 15, 16 per cent. The numbers have not moved since 2002 and
are going in the wrong direction."
- reprinted from CBC news