As a young woman in Canada, I have not felt discriminated against. Throughout my university career, my gender didn’t seem to matter and professors encouraged me to pursue a PhD and the life of an academic as much as any of my male fellow students. Growing up in Bulgaria was a different story – my own mother stopped me from going to a physics-based high school program at home because she felt that physics in not for women (those were her words). As an electrical engineer herself, she obviously had experienced discrimination and wanted to prevent me from going down that same road.

In Canada, however, I didn’t get any of that. Maybe it’s because I live in Vancouver, but what I hear Canadians tell their girls is that they can grow up to become anything they aspire to — rocket scientists, surgeons or presidents. Many of the young women I meet feel similarly – they feel that they are free to make choices and say they are as much in control of their career paths as their male friends.

Yet, when we look at the numbers, women are not growing up to be rocket scientists, surgeons or presidents. Nurses, teachers and social workers is more like it. Women are woefully underrepresented in “non-traditional” occupations such as high-level management and natural sciences. Even in the public sector, where women make up the majority of the workforce, they’re less likely to hold senior management jobs than men.

Yes, there are some women in leadership positions in areas that were previously closed to our gender in politics, business and academia. But they are few and far between.

So, if young women feel that gender is irrelevant for economic success, then why are women’s average annual earnings for full-time, full-year work in 2007 only 71 .4% of men’s? Why are average hourly wages so different: in January 2010, women got paid on average $20.59 per hour, compared to men’s $24.49? Why do women continue to be overrepresented in low-wage jobs? Over 60% of minimum wage workers are women and the proportion of workers earning under $10 per hour is similar.

It would seem that something happens somewhere along the line between school, when the sky’s the limit, and the demands of real life which pushes women into traditional sectors. The older I get, the more convinced I become that this something is children. Or rather, that it’s the outdated family policy that we have in Canada (and the US) that forces women to choose between motherhood and career or economic success.

Recent studies from the US show that in corporate America, childless women’s earnings are on par with men’s, and the earning discrepancies appear when women start having children. Research by Statistics Canada shows that having children is associated with an earnings loss that persists throughout a woman’s working career. At any given age, women with one child earned about 9% on average than childless women, while those with two children earner 12% less, and those with three or more children earned 20% less. The earning gap was larger for women with higher education than for those who only had high school diplomas. Curiously, this parental penalty does not seem to apply to men – men with children earn more on average than childless men.

The more I dig into the research, the more it seems that women with children earn less because they end up taking years away from work. And the reason that they are often forced to do so is that women remain the primary caregivers for children and we lack the social supports to allow women to work and care at the same time. Changing this would require a concerted effort by governments and the private sector.

What governments have control over is Canada’s family policy, and it is sorely in need of change to catch up to social realities of the 21st century – many women with children work, whether by choice or by necessity, and we need to put in place adequate programs to support these women and their families.

Providing accessible childcare that families can afford is an obvious one. Improving parental leave provisions is another way to improve many women’s lives. Statistics Canada quotes a recent survey showing that 40% of new parents could not take the entire parental leave because their family’s financial situation required them to go back to work. Increasing benefit amounts to reflect costs of living would be a great start.

Employers will also have to adapt, and we’ve already started to see some of that. More and more employers allow flexible working hours, opportunities to work from home and an increased availability of part time work. These are all changes that make it possible for women to care for children without having to completely withdraw from the workforce for years at a time.

Some companies are even in the business of raising awareness that women have not achieved nearly equal representation on the top of organizations both in the private sector and in government. McKinsey & Company is probably the largest and best-known professional services firm that is calling attention to the shortage of women in leadership positions in America’s businesses. Their reports, Women Matter and Women Matter 2, demonstrate some important relationships between the presence of women in corporate leadership roles and the financial performance of organizations and explore why that may be the case. This is a good start, but more work needs to be done.

The need to support women to work and to care would only become more pressing as the population ages and we start to experience labour force shortages. We need the women to fully participate in the labour market, as workers and as decision-makers. Changing family policy and making workplaces more flexible is the way to do it.

So go ahead and continue telling the girls that the sky’s the limit, but let’s also make sure that it’s really true.

Happy international women’s day to all.

It’s hard for me to see friends struggle financially, so I’ve tried to encourage Emily to get a better job. Though she doesn’t have a degree, Emily is bright and a hard worker — she should be able to do better.

But Emily doesn’t want to get a better paying job. There is no point, she tells me, because she’s close to the cut off point of many of the government subsidies she relies on and if she made even $1,000 more per year, she’d lose so much in government benefits that her net income would end up lower.

She’s calculated that she needs to earn thousands of dollars more per year to compensate for the value of the lost benefits and she figures that she can’t get such a job without finishing her degree. Which she can’t afford because her low income doesn’t allow her to save up for school. But she can’t get a higher-paying job to help finance her education because if her income went up she’d lose her childcare subsidy, her housing subsidy and will have to start making payments on her student loans.

It seems like the system is stacked against her.

And she’s not the only one. Many low-income people find themselves in a similar position as the majority of government benefits are targeted to the lowest income categories and phased out quickly as soon as the family’s income gets above the bare minimum. A recently released CCPA brief addresses the problem of benefit “stacking” and presents some possible solutions. You can read more about it here.

It’s a classic case of unintended consequences: policy-makers start with the laudable goal of helping the most needy first and they try to avoid spending scarce resources on those who are able to pay for themselves, but in targeting benefits narrowly to the lowest income families they make it very difficult for people like Emily to break out of the low-wage cycle of economic insecurity. For those who need to obtain further post-secondary education or training to be able to move up, the system becomes a catch-22 when BC’s high tuition fees are taken into account.

Benefit stacking is a real problem in BC and it needs to be considered carefully in the design of all new low-income tax credits and other benefits. I haven’t run the numbers, but my guess is that the new low-income credits the government just introduced in the last budget (the HST credit and the new premium assistance) are only compounding the problem.

These cuts have been devastating to many service delivery agencies and will result in the cancellation of programs that benefit the least fortunate in our society: children growing up in low income families, women at risk of violence, the poor. In a recent news release, the CCPA has called for the government to repeal all the cuts made since the February budget.

Make no mistake: these cuts are made because our provincial government wants to end up with a smaller deficit at the end of the fiscal year, not because we cannot afford to help vulnerable groups during a serious recession. Despite the recession, BC is one of the wealthiest provinces in this country. Our provincial debt is relatively low. We certainly have the capacity to cushion the blow of the economic downturn to the more vulnerable individuals and families among us. But our government is choosing not to.

In fact, in their obsession with minimizing the size of the deficit, our policy-makers are pushing people into further hardship. And those who have to endure the pain are those who can least afford it. Kudos to Bill Good for recognizing this simple fact on his CKNW show this morning.

The savings from reduced government grants to social service agencies are $354 million, a mere 0.9% of the overall $40 billion provincial budget for 2009/10. These cuts could easily have been accommodated in only a slightly higher deficit.

The recession is temporary, and so are the current deficits, but the lost educational opportunities for children would never be recovered. It’s penny wise but pound foolish to cut funding to programs that have already been pared to the bone and that provide services with long-term payoffs.

The government is trying to create the impression that cuts are concentrated among “nice to have” but non-essential programs. This is simply not the case. Many of the initiatives that are now being cut have been set up to fill a need that exists because the government is not providing adequate social services and supports out of its core budget. Literacy initiatives, supports for violence against women and children or seniors’ activity programs that keep people healthy and out of hospitals should not be left to the whim of discretionary grants funding. We need to ask ourselves questions such as whether we prefer to pay for programs that enrich the lives of disadvantaged children as they grow up, or for policing and anti-gang measures a few years in the future.

The secrecy with which these cuts have been implemented is also egregious. Without knowing exactly what is being cut, we cannot evaluate the impact of the cuts, and without openness and transparency it is simply not possible to have an honest public debate about priorities. This is why we’ve launched our own effort to track the cuts and we are asking affected groups or individuals to come forward and share their stories.

A new Early Childhood Learning Agency will be established. It will assess the feasibility and costs of full school day kindergarten for five-year-olds. It will also undertake a feasibility study of providing parents with the choice of day-long kindergarten for four-year-olds by 2010, and for three-year-olds by 2012. That report will be completed and released within the year.

If you can’t seem to recall ever hearing about that report, you’re not alone. The report was quietly posted on the BC Ministry of Education website just before Easter this year (a little behind schedule) and left for interested web-surfers to discover for themselves. With no government news release announcing the report completion (that I could find), it’s hardly surprising that it received virtually no media attention. The only mention of the report that I have seen so far is in this article by Pieta Woolley in the online version of the Georgia Straight, and it came almost a month after the report’s release.

This is a pity because the Early Childhood Learning Agency produced an excellent report. Expanded Early Learning in British Columbia for Children Age Three to Five draws on the latest research on early child development and a year-long consultation with parents, childcare providers and other stakeholders to conclude that expanding early learning programs in BC is both desirable and feasible.

The Agency estimated the total operating costs to about $615 million per year for full day programs available to all three, four and five-year-olds. The report recommended that the program be introduced in stages over several years and even outlined next steps for the government to take right away, taking into account the fiscal constraints that the current recession imposes. Next steps include:

1. carrying out a detailed facilities analysis and starting to prepare space for programs;
2. creating a human resource strategy; and
3. developing program standards for full day kindergarten for five-year-olds and pre-kindergarten for four-year-olds

Yet, you won’t find any of the reports’ recommendations reflected in the BC Liberals’ election platform. The closest the current government comes to committing to action is this paragraph on the BC Ministry of Education website:

Based on the findings of the feasibility work and its commitment to expanding early learning, the British Columbia government is still committed to pursuing the vision for full day kindergarten and other enhanced early learning opportunities for our youngest learners as soon as reasonably possible. [emphasis added]

The NDP is not doing much better on the childcare front. Their platform states that they will introduce full day kindergarten for five-year-olds “as finances permit” (where have I heard that before?) and promise to create “targets and timelines to build an affordable, accessible, quality child care system” (but we are left to wonder what these targets and timelines might be).

Both parties have made it clear that childcare and early childhood education are not priorities for them, hiding behind the recession as an excuse. But there is no need to make children wait for quality early learning programs until after the recession. $615 million is not a trivial amount of money, but it is only about 0.3% of provincial GDP and, as a society, we can easily afford it if we make it a priority.

It is not only possible but also desirable to invest in early childhood education in times of recession. Because as Susan Prentice points out in Old Dollars, New Sense: Recent Evidence and Arguments about Child Care Spending, childcare is better seen as “a productive investment instead of an economic drain on the public purse – one that will more than pay for itself in the future.”

As an added benefit in these hard economic times, setting up a universally available province-wide preschool program will create jobs when they are most needed. New classrooms/early learning centres would have to be built, employing construction workers in the process. Additional teachers and early childhood educations will be required to staff the programs, creating jobs (which, incidentally, would be mainly filled by women – a group that has been largely ignored in the government’s stimulus package so far).

What surprises me is that we don’t hear more outraged voices on this issue, considering the large number of people who stand to benefit from an expanded and improved childcare system. Pieta Woolley reminds us that:

Given that about 30.4 percent of British Columbians live in a household with kids 12 or under, the child-care issue theoretically affects more citizens than seniors’ issues (14.6 percent of B.C. is 65 or older), aboriginal issues (4.8 percent of the B.C. population is status), and public transit (4.7 percent take transit to work; all numbers according to the 2006 census).

UBC’s Paul Kershaw, assistant professor of political science, proposes an interesting theory as to why childcare is neglected in this year’s party platforms:

1. The costs scare politicians.
“By today’s standards,” he said, “it’s relatively expensive. And by that I mean we haven’t had to create a new social program in quite some time, as we did having to create health care and unemployment insurance and pensions. These are very expensive programs, but they’ve become normalized so we don’t view them as such. Health case is $15 billion, and childcare is $1.5 billion, so it’s no small chunk of change for any provincial budget. That’s one of the key reasons it’s a hot potato.”

2. Politicians won’t fund health promotion.
“We’re wonderful about treating illness after the fact. We will spend hundreds of thousands—if not millions—to save one preterm baby, but we are very uncomfortable about promoting housing for families with children that is affordable, or making the case that no one goes hungry in our province, or is homeless. Even when you get into the middle class, and childcare is largely a middle class issue, we don’t seem too concerned that we get these kids off to a good start in life. We let parents put together a patchwork of inadequate supports. We could really do so much to promote health if we go it right in the early years.”

3. Feminist arguments are considered fringy by politicians.
“No one wants to talk about gender inequality anymore….Even when both parents work full-time, women shoulder the responsible to shoulder childcare alternatives when regular care falls through, they stay home when the kids are sick. That’s just how houses are making decisions. Just 15 percent of people taking parental leave are men….Public policy seems content to say, women, figure it out yourselves….We are content to burn out women.”

4. The baby boomers are a “Canadian blight”.

“We are unwilling to ask tough questions about generational inequality….This is the generation that has their hands on the levers of power that’s tolerating 30 percent of our school-age population showing up vulnerable. These intergenerational justice questions are getting sidelined, because the dominant question seniors are wanting to ask is how much money is going to be there for me to get that next knee replacement. We need to make sure people are comfortable and cared for, but before we start debating whether people are eligible for three knee replacements, I think we really do want to think about what it means to promote health over the lifecourse and get that part right.”

I find the last point particularly interesting, as it starts raising questions about generational inequality. Can it be that politicians pay more attention to seniors because unlike children, seniors can vote? Consider also that seniors traditionally have high voter turnout rates, much higher than those of young people, the group that includes most parents of young children.

I hope I’m not being too cynical here. But it would be nice if the parties running for election would do something to dispel that cynicism. (if I may borrow from the conclusion of a recent Paul Krugman blog post)

For more excellent coverage on childcare in the election campaign, check out Ms Woolley’s articles Parties mum on time lines for child-care plans, Political parties ignore recent government-written plan for childcare and UBC prof gives four reasons BC isn’t delivering childcare.

And while we’re at it, how about a commitment to an affordable, universal child care program ala Quebec, so more parents, especially women, can join or stay in the workforce?

These would be two of the best investments and economic recovery policies, if we’re thinking long term. Any takers candidates?

But, to stimulate the economy, surely we need to invest in both social and physical infrastructure. Lets take child care as an example. A provincial commitment in tomorrow’s budget to begin building a universal, quality publicly funded child care system will create construction jobs – just like other traditional infrastructure investments. But, it will also create jobs for women - who are the overwhelming majority of BC’s early childhood educators. nvestment in child care will also make it possible for parents to work or go to school to train or retrain. And, most importantly, an investment in child care will support children’s development – something that is even more important now that families are stretched and stressed. 

I can’t think of a better way to stimulate the economy and build strong communities.  Can you?