Testimony before Standing Senate Committee on National Finance

Sarah Kaplan was a witness for the Senate Standing Committee on National Finance regarding Bill C-86, Part 4, Division 18 to enact the creation of a Department for Women and Gender Equality, December 2018.

🎥 Watch the full video here.

📝 Read the transcript here.

Sarah’s remarks below:

It is an honour to appear before this committee to comment on Bill C-86 as it relates to the creation of the department for women and gender equality. In my role as professor I promote the use of rigorous academic research to inform policy and practice, with a specific goal of supporting innovative new solutions to achieving gender equality.

There are a number of reasons that the creation of this department will yield progress on equality in Canadian society. First, it announces and anchors equality as a central value for Canadians.

Its name signals its focus on women and also people of diverse genders, including two spirit, gender non-binary and trans people. It further signals attention to men and masculinity. As we have learned from recent effort to improve parental leave policies, it is vital to pay attention to facilitating new norms of masculinity that can transform caregiving and paid work for men, women and people of diverse genders.

Relatedly, I would also like to call to your attention the importance of the particulars section which includes understanding:

. . . the intersection of sex and gender with other identity factors that include race, national and ethnic origin, Indigenous origin or identity, age, sexual orientation, socio-economic conditions, place of residence and disability.

That the department would have this mandate to put intersectionality front and centre is essential for the pursuit of equality because we know that most barriers to full participation in all spheres of peoples’ lives come precisely at these points of intersection.

Second, appropriately funded and resourced the department can serve as a centre of excellence for capabilities in gender analysis and policy making. While some form of gender analysis has been mandated since 1995 at the federal level, we still lack essential capabilities for conducting and using these analyses. This is at the federal, provincial and local levels of government, as well as in the corporate and non-profit spheres.

Gender analysis, at its best, should be used for three interrelated sets of activities: first, qualitative and quantitative need finding; second, policy design and implementation; and third, policy evaluation. To date, most of the efforts have been placed on the third step. We formulate a policy and then see what the gender effects might be, perhaps implementing remedial steps to try to fix any adverse impacts. I worry that even this third step may not be conducted at a sufficient level of depth with the right level of research and analysis, especially including the intersections I mentioned above.

Let’s take, for example, the Innovation Superclusters Initiative which admitted, in its own program guide, that it will be investing in industries that attract more skilled workers who are men compared to women. It indicated that to address this problem applicants must “articulate how they will endeavour to increase female representation concerning both employment and leadership.” However, if we were to have started with a gender analysis we might have designed a supercluster initiative that had inclusive innovation at its base rather than as an additional consideration.

Thus, using gender analysis from the outset might have the potential to change and improve policy design. For example, in infrastructure investment we know that investments in local-stop public transportation differentially benefit women and children, while investments in highways benefit men who tend to drive or commute longer distances. A true analysis of the impacts of maternity leave would have shown that extension of such leaves to 18 months is a poor substitute for child care and can do serious damage to women’s attachment to the labour force.

Such information should shape choices about how policies, budgets and taxes are decided. Here I fully concur with Professor Lahey’s testimony that you heard in the previous session this evening.

The department has the opportunity to develop gender analysis capabilities and support other departments and agencies in meeting their mandate to do true gender budgeting. This will strengthen the national capacity to advance gender equality in all of its intersections. Capability development takes time. It requires sustained investment and an accumulation of data, research and experience over years. It requires support for an ecosystem of government bodies, grassroots organizations and business. Creating a department assures that this accumulation process cannot be interrupted or set back as it has been in the past, without the significant public debate that would come from the legislative process.

Third, the department, again with sufficient funding and resources, can also be a source of policy innovation based on the gender analysis it will conduct. Gender analysis, as I mentioned before, will be least effective if it is only used as a policy evaluation tool. Its true power comes when the insights generated lead to innovative policies that overcome many of the impasses faced by efforts to achieve gender equality to date.

For example, today we worry that not enough women enter into entrepreneurship, so we layer on special pools of funds to the Business Development Bank for female entrepreneurs. What if we used research and analysis to develop new, inclusive models for promoting entrepreneurship that might help the BDC reinvent entirely how it works? We cannot know without the careful work of a department dedicated to making the most of research and analysis on current inequalities and on key mechanisms for overcoming them.

On a personal note and speaking as an immigrant to Canada, I can say in conclusion that Canada today has the opportunity to be a global beacon of light when it comes to gender equality. The creation of a department for women and gender equality can be a powerful symbol of Canada’s commitment to these issues and, importantly, a source of innovation and insight for Canada and the world as we continue to work toward equality. Thank you very much.