The Woman QuestionWhy childcare is still a women’s issue

Isn’t this awfully 1970s?

• Theoretical arguments

• Empirical evidence

• Strategic and tactical considerations

December 2006: Canadian women are “equal”

Minister Bev Oda removes “equality” from the mandate of Status of Women

Closes most Status of Women offices

Stops all spending on women's rights advocacy

“This government does fundamentally believe that women are equal.”

Helping women’s organizations

participate in the public policy

process

Increasing public understanding of women’s equality

issues

What kind of Canada?

Pierre Polievre (Nepean–Carleton, CPC): “We would take those same child care dollars that this government would give to a babysitting bureaucracy and we would give it to parents directly.”

Dismantling & Delegitimizing

• Undoing decades of feminist (and social justice) activism that had begun to change structures of power

• Women begin to disappear from political view

Gender Injustices in Canada • UN Gender Disparity Index– Canada ranked 20th

• World Economic Forum Gender Gap Index– 2004: Canada ranked 4th

– 2012: Canada ranked 21st

• behind the Philippines, Latvia, Cuba and Nicaragua

Gender Injustice

Women are far more likely than men to:

•lose time at work because of personal or family responsibilities;

•work less or part-time, and to earn less;

•live below the poverty line;

•be a single-parent head of a family with young children;

Women are second-class economic citizens• In 2008, women earned, on average, 83 cents to

every dollar earned by men (an increase of 8¢ since 1988.)

Women are victimized

• 87% of victims of sexual assault are women

• 80% of the victims of “other sexual violations” are women

Women die from inequality• In 2009 women were almost three times more likely

than men to be killed by a spouse;

• Aboriginal women are 5-7 times more likely than other women to die of violence

• In 2001, the estimated life expectancy at birth for an Aboriginal girl was 76.8 years, compared to a non-Aboriginal girl who could expect to live to be 82

• The Native Women's Association of Canada has documented more than 580 cases of murdered and missing women.

Sexism in taxation

• Working income tax credits privilege the male-breadwinner family,– Reflects the Canadian government’s “Failure to take its

commitments to the female half of the population seriously.”

What are we waiting for?

• Pay equity, employment equity and education equity;

• Police and justice policies to keep women and girls safe and alive;

• Public policies to support work-family reconciliation;

• Childcare

Claims-making and childcare

Mobilizing gender justice

• Women need childcare– Claims-making in the name of women’s needs is

disruptive

Strategic & tactical considerations

• Some kinds of needs can’t be met by the private market – they require public provision and public solutions.

• Not only can’t the market help solve the childcare problem, it is market relations that caused the childcare crisis in the first place.

Strategic & Tactical Considerations