Inequality of well-being among families with children is increasing at an even faster rate than income inequality, according to a new study by Peter Burton and Shelley Phipps, “Families, Time, and Well-Being in Canada”. They find that total family working hours have increased for most families, but not for those at the top of the income spectrum who have been […]
Read moreStatscan have released an interesting paper, “The Income Management Strategies of Older Couples in Canada.” It looks at who controls the family finances in couples with one partner aged 45 and over. (They used the age cut off because a special question was added to the General Social Survey which is restricted to that age group.) This is important because […]
Read morePEF member Salimah Valiani is now the research economist at the Ontario Nurses Association. Just in time for Mothers’ Day ONA released a most excellent paper by Salimah, titled: Valuing the Invaluable: Rethinking and respecting caring work in Canada  Here is the abstract: Using concepts of feminist economics, this paper demonstrates the range of ways in which carework is […]
Read moreEvery party is courting the women’s vote. They are The Undecided – more women than men are still parking their vote. That’s typical of most elections. Women listen for longer, decide later in an election campaign. When the time comes, they will be the kingmakers, if you’ll pardon the term. It leaps to mind because Stephen Harper just said, in […]
Read moreI recently had the chance to read a 2008 book entitled Who Goes? Who Stays? What Matters? Accessing and Persisting in Post-Secondary Education in Canada. Edited by Ross Finnie, Richard Mueller, Arthur Sweetman and Alex Usher, the anthology features 14 chapters written by a total of 21 authors.   I found Chapter 4 (co-authored by Finnie and Mueller) and Chapter […]
Read moreStatscan have released their regular (about every 5 years) statistical compilation, Women in Canada. In a box in the earnings section – around Table 20- one will find a short summary of a paper by Michael Baker and Statscan employee Marie Drolet from the December, 2010 issue of Canadian Public Policy. Entitled “The Gender Wage Gap Revisited” it states that: […]
Read moreJohn Richards tells us “tough love” was the right public policy stance for governments to take in the mid 1990s. In his report released today by the C.D.Howe Institute, Reducing Lone Parent Poverty: A Canadian Success Story,Richards tells us that the tightening of access to welfare and the imposition of workfare was the kick-in-the-butt that lone parents needed to move […]
Read moreI just had a telling experience with the CBC in Vancouver. Their show “On the Coast†was doing a piece on the discriminatory experience of a young women who applied for a job at Joey Restaurants. She went through their training period (which consisted largely of tips about how to dress and apply makeup), but at the end of the […]
Read moreI was pleasantly surprised to see a report published yesterday by Don Drummond and Francis Fong at the TD Bank on the Changing Canadian Workplace.  It provides a short but decent summary of some different issues affecting labour: macro trends, educational requirements, changing composition, women, immigrants, aboriginal Canadians, older workers, widening income gaps, income security, etc.  These are a lot of […]
Read moreToday’s day-after-International-Women’s-Day story in the New York Times by Nancy Folbre links to four indices of gender equity. How is Canada doing? Canada ranks 4th in the Human Development Index (we were number one for eight years) as well as the UNDP Gender Development Index, behind Norway, Australia and Iceland. Norway has been ranked the best country for human development […]
Read moreLast weekend, I spoke at a community event celebrating International Women’s Day in Vancouver. It got me thinking about the status of women in the Canadian economy, reflecting both on the successes over the last half century and on the areas where work is still needed to achieve gender equality. As a young woman in Canada, I have not felt […]
Read moreThe Globe seems rather agitated about the plight of male university students . On top of a front page story by Elizabeth Church yesterday pointing out the now rather well known fact that female undergraduate enrollment now outstrips male enrollment by a margin of 58% to 42%, they editorialize today as follows: “Indira Samarasekera, the president of the University of […]
Read moreI purchase a monthly unadjusted Labour Force Survey data series from StatsCan that provides monthly labour force trends by age, sex, province, and type of job (full-time, part-time, by industry, and by status – self-employed or employed). This is a helpful addition to the published monthly stats in The Daily, which use seasonally adjusted numbers from the Labour Force Survey. […]
Read morePEF member Salimah Valiani has written a report, released today by No One is Illegal, on the topic of temporary migrant workers in Canada, and a quiet but important shift in our immigration policies. The full report can be downloaded here and the abstract follows: This report elaborates the shift in immigration policy which began unfolding in Canada from the […]
Read moreFrom Kathleen Lahey, a Law professor at Queen’s University: Budget 2009: Designed to Leave Women Behind – Again The big picture:   Women make up slightly more than half the population of Canada, and are directly responsible for caring for the majority of minor children in the country on a day to day basis. The expectation:   As an ‘economic recovery’ and […]
Read moreI just got back from a week in New York City with my wife, in which, among other things, we went to see five Broadway shows (I know the best way to get cheap tickets now). It was during the intermission to Rent that it finally hit me that something must be done about a fundamental injustice in our society. […]
Read more The CLC today released – on the eve of International Women’s Day – a major report on women and economic equality.  I’ll be presenting it at the PEF meetings in June. The report flags a question which is not posed often or clearly enough – why has the pay (and wider opportunity) gap between women and men stopped closing over […]
Read moreA recent StatsCan research paper by Marc Frenette and Simon Coulombe “Has Higher Education Among Young Women Substantially Reduced the Gender Gap in Employment and Earnings?” (Analytical Research Paper Series. June, 2007) contains some rather startling data. http://www.statcan.ca/english/research/11F0019MIE/11F0019MIE2007301.htm The paper looks at employment and earnings for young men and women aged 25 to 29, in each of 1981, 1991, and […]
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