Section 3 SOCIAL NORMS AND MEASUREMENT FRAMEWORKS

Canada has done little to explicitly combat gender stereotypes and norms around care work. The federal government should be commended for converting Status of Women Canada into a full government department, Women and Gender Equality Canada. The incorporation of gender-based analysis plus (GBA+) into the budgeting process has also been a welcome development. However, there are no explicit government policies aimed at increasing awareness of gender norms and care work through education or public campaigns, nor aimed at preventing the proliferation of gender stereotypes in advertising. Combating gender stereotypes and norms, which is essential to eliminating gender inequality, is not listed in the mandate of Women and Gender Equality Canada, nor any other government department.78

In addition to supporting other government departments to ensure their policies do not promote gender inequality, Women and Gender Equality Canada also works with community organizations to combat harmful gender stereotypes. However, an explicit mandate to address gender stereotypes, especially around care work, and a commitment to coordinate action at scale through education policy and public awareness campaigns could have transformational effects.

Although there is no federal policy to address gender stereotypes in advertising and media, industry bodies have set up self-regulating standards. The Canadian Code of Advertising Standards prohibits discrimination based on sex and gender identity and the media’s Equitable Portrayal Code prohibits “unduly negative stereotypical material” with regard to gender.79 These efforts by industry groups are commendable, however, they exist to fill a gap left by the federal government’s lack of regulation. These industry bodies have little power to reprimand actors who publish ads or media containing harmful stereotypes and investigations are only conducted in response to public complaints. Deciding what media and ads are acceptable should be a matter of democratic deliberation, not a decision made by industry groups.

Gender stereotypes and norms around care work are contributing factors to gender inequality and gender-based violence. Gender norms that portray women as caretakers contribute to unequal participation in the workforce and higher pay in jobs typically occupied by men, leading to the gender pay gap. Gender-based violence is often used to reinforce the power differences and maintain the gender hierarchies that are learned early in our patriarchal society. Establishing explicit education policies to help children identify and unlearn gender stereotypes would help transform this patriarchal system. Educational policy is a provincial responsibility in Canada, but federal leadership could be shown by developing curricula to combat gender stereotypes and tying transfer payments to provincial implementation plans.

Understanding the gendered division of care work is not possible without high-quality data. Statistics Canada has conducted a time-use survey that allows for the estimation of time spent doing paid and unpaid care work every five to seven years since 1986. This is an invaluable resource for understanding the gendered division of care in Canada. Unfortunately, the most recent wave of this survey, conducted in 2015, did not collect sufficient data for racialized groups and Indigenous peoples to allow for an examination of the care workload for racialized or Indigenous women.80

Although it is not yet complete, the Department of Finance and Statistics Canada are working together to develop a national measurement framework to monitor progress toward improving well-being.81 This work is encouraging and should be developed with an intersectional lens and an emphasis on valuing care work and other aspects of well-being missing from typical statistics. The draft set of indicators does include time use although it is not clear whether the gendered and racialized division of the care workload will be explicitly considered.

Canada has endeavoured to establish itself as a feminist leader in applying intersectional analysis to its policy development by requiring that all federal departments apply GBA+ to government policy. Unfortunately, the implementation of GBA+ has left much to be desired. It has been critiqued for narrowing the goals of feminist movements and for failing to fully integrate an intersectional approach.82 Even if one accepts the limitations of the government’s GBA+ approach, the Auditor General concluded that the ”government does not know whether its use of GBA+ is achieving better gender equality outcomes.”83 In sum, although the federal government has made progress on collecting data around care work and gender inequality, there is still a long way to go to improve disaggregated data collection for groups experiencing intersecting axes of marginalization and to use this data to inform policy development and evaluation.