Monday,
March 8 is a global celebration of International Women’s Day.
Some of
you might be asking, why the heck do we need an International Women’s Day? What’s the point? Women have already achieved
equality, right? Wrong!
Sad as
it is to say in this day and age, despite all of the strides women’s rights
have made, even in Canada, the differences between women and men are fairly
substantial. For proof look no farther
than Canada’s own independent agency for collecting data, Statistics Canada.
The
StatsCan publication, “Women in Canada: A Gender-based Statistical Report”,
released in 2006, has some pretty shocking information in it. The report itself
is chock-full of all kinds of interesting statistics presented in a
not-so-interesting way so we’ll just cover some of highlights to save you the
trouble of reading through the entire 309 pages.
Right
from the get-go we learn that “substantial gender gaps persist on most major
socio-economic variables”, which essentially means that in a lot of really
important things, women and men experience things very differently. There’s
employment, income, violence, and a slew of other factors, but let’s stick to
the big one: money.
Women
make up 58 percent of the paid work force, yet they only earn 71 percent of
what men earn. If you think of it, at those rates, that’s the same as if a
woman worked every day from around mid-September until Dec. 31 for free while a
man doing the same job is still getting paid!
This has been about the same rate for the last decade (yes, you read
that right, the last decade!). Fully
67 percent of employed women still work in fields traditionally dominated by
women, namely teaching, nursing (and related health occupations), clerical, administrative,
and sales/service and all are amongst the lower paying jobs.
The
report states, “Women continue to remain very much a minority among
professionals employed in the natural sciences, engineering, and
mathematics”. This is not because women
have less aptitude for maths and sciences, so why does this trend persist? Good question!
In both
private sector and public sector jobs, only 37 percent of managerial positions
are held by women and of these, the majority of women are in low-level management.
Again, this is not because women are incapable of being effective managers, so
why is this happening?
Maybe
it has something to do with the statistical fact that women are “far more
likely than their male counterparts to lose time on the job because of personal
or family responsibilities”. Family dynamics continue to place a greater
responsibility and time-consuming duties on the mother than they do on the
father with respect to child-rearing and home care.
Which
brings up a whole other realm of money inequalities when measured amongst single-parent
families. A full 38 percent of single-mom families fall below the poverty line
(or as the report now calls it, the “low-income level”) while only 13 percent
of single-dad families are below the line. In 2001 there were over 1 million
Canadian families headed by single moms,
so if we do the math that means 380,000 women raising their kids alone were
trying to live on an amount the Canadian government acknowledges is impossible
to live on.
The
StatsCan gender study goes into detail about some other important differences
between the way women and men experience life in Canada, such as rates of experiencing
violence, disabilities, and numerous other consequences of experiencing
poverty.
The
data all serves reinforce the fact that Canadian women and men are not
experiencing equality. International Women’s Day is not just about wanting
equality for women in other parts of the world.
The
issues are here and celebrating International Women’s Day on Monday, March 8 is
one way of recognizing that things still need to change in order for women to
have the true equality they deserve.
For
info on local International Women’s Day activities, call the Public Education
Coordinator at 613-257-1115 ext. 2. Lanark County Interval House provides
shelter and support for women and their children who have experienced physical,
sexual, emotional, or financial abuse. Call 613-257-5960 or 1-800-267-7946 or
click www.lcih.org.