Saturday, March 8 is International Women’s Day and Canadian women have come a long way, but the struggle is not finished.

It is true that over the last few decades women in Canada have made tremendous gains. Equality rights are now finally entrenched in the Constitution of Canada and more women than ever are participating in the workforce.

More women than ever in Canada are receiving higher levels of education and taking on leadership roles. Overall, these advances made by women have made Canada a much better place to live and have played a key role in boosting productivity as well as contributing to Canada’s per capita real income growth.

While it is important to celebrate the gains that have been made, we must also recognize that there are many challenges and barriers that prevent women and girls from achieving their full potential. In fact, present day inequalities in Canada are astounding. For instance, women are much more likely to be employed in part-time, low-paying jobs, while at the same time are less likely given the chance to assume managerial and other leadership positions despite their confidence and desire to advance. They also remain significantly underrepresented in sciences, mathematics, engineering, trades and technology fields which tend to pay higher wages than traditionally female dominated occupations.

Many factors contribute to these employment inequities, including the struggle to balance work and family life, lack of role models, exclusion from informal networks, and the obvious biases in some workplaces. Overall these factors lead to labour markets and workplace cultures that are not fully inclusive of women, standstill progress and perpetuate ongoing wage disparities between women and men. Too many women still do two thirds of unpaid work. Studies show that full-time working women, married or not, are still doing all the laundry, housework, grocery shopping, child rearing and other work stay-at-home mothers do.

Childcare is so expensive for families with more than one child needing the service, it actually makes sense for low-income earners to go on or stay on welfare than to improve their education and work opportunities. We should and we can invest in childcare. This would ease the access by low-income earners and single parents to access the labour force therefore making it easier for women to become viable wage earners in the household. When you have people working, there is income tax reaped from wage earners and those working have more spending power. There are also jobs created by creating affordable child care: jobs for women, for the child care worker, for early childhood educators, for all the spaces and infrastructure that would be needed to set childcare up. It is a win-win situation, and confusing for this author to understand why our governments cannot see this simple and viable solution.

Violence against women also remains as a major concern for Canadian women. One in three women will be affected by violence against them over the course of their lifetime. Not only does this jeopardize a woman’s security and wellbeing, it also costs Canada over $4 billion dollars annually for lost productivity and increased costs for social services, health care, and legal aid. Taking action to prevent and address gender violence is not only a human rights concern, it is an economic issue.

Recent studies conducted by the Organization for Economic Co-operations and Development (OECD) and others have concluded that closing the gap between women’s and men’s share of employment could increase GDP by between nine to 16 percent. There is also a growing body of literature that shows that companies that are able to capitalize on women’s leadership have a competitive advantage, as women bring unique perspectives, clear communication and collaborative decision-making processes to the table. At the family and community level, women reinvest higher proportions of their incomes in the people around them, and continue to contribute the countless hours of unpaid work to ensure others are cared for.

Clearly, investing in the empowerment of Canada’s women and girls benefits all of us and must be a priority. In the not-so-distant past, Canada has been recognized as a leader for advancing the status of women and girls; however, more recently, Canada has lost ground on key global gender equality measures, dropping out of the world’s top 20 countries in 2012. Now is the time to call on government, the private sector, communities and families to make Canada a leader once again. As a society, we can and must do more to eliminate all barriers to create a country that supports true gender equality for the full diversity of Canada’s women and girls.

There are no simple solutions; but women like Canadian Federation of University Women (CFUW) Cranbrook Club’s Woman of the year 2014, Gail Brown, has shown the entire East Kootenay and all she has touched, the goals are within our reach. When we realize the how much has been accomplished in the last 30 years in this area alone as well within all of Canada, we can be hopeful about the future.

The Cranbrook Club has 12 members locally and is a member of CFUW National, a non-political, voluntary, self-funded, bilingual and non-governmental organization of women university graduates in 110 clubs across Canada that works to improve the status of women and girls, education, peace, justice and human rights. CFUW holds special consultative status at the United Nations (ECOSOC) and belongs to the Sectoral Committee of Education of the Canadian Commission for UNESCO. CFUW is the largest of 61 national affiliates of the International Federation of University Women (IFUW).

– Respectfully submitted by the membership of CFUW National, BC Council and the Cranbrook Club

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