While people in the Western world often assume that extended families in developing countries are oppressive to women who marry into them, family support can actually enable women to take on paying jobs outside the home.

Many of Canada's like-minded global partners and competitors have prioritized closing the gender wage gap as a way to achieve gender economic equality. These measures include laws that prohibit employers from asking about previous salaries, employer reporting on a number of equality metrics and requiring some form of pay transparency. Iceland's recent legislation to fine companies that did not achieve wage equality is the most recent to garner global attention. As yet, no country or jurisdiction has implemented a program that captures the full range of practices that would assure gender equality in the workplace, but Canada could be poised to set this agenda.

Viewing social and economic development as a series of interpersonal interactions can help us understand why development outcomes sometimes diverge from policy goals, and how gendered interactions shape social and economic development.

Our ongoing obsession with the myth of meritocracy is now spreading to education systems in developing economies with pernicious effects.

Involving men in women’s economic development projects can lead to higher impact for women and changes in gender norms.

Last week, Jean-Yves Duclos, the minister of families, children and social development, announced new family care policies designed to increase flexibility for people needing to care for children and other family members. The new policies increase parental leave from 12 to 18 months and offer caregiver benefits of 15 weeks for sick or injured adult members of families and 35 weeks for sick or injured children. There are many appealing features of these plans, especially the caregiver benefits, which are now extended not just to parents but to other family members providing care and also allow for a broader range of medical professionals to certify the claim. This makes it easier for families to rally around the needs of family members. However, it is unclear if these new policies solve the problems they were meant to address, especially when it comes to parental leave.

The mass killings at the gay nightclub in Orlando have cast a terrible pall on Pride season this year. One recurring theme in the discussion is the importance of gay nightclubs as safe spaces - refuges, havens or sacred places - where members of the LGBTQ community can let their guard down and be themselves. Gay bars and clubs have long been understood to have this important role in the gay community, primarily because there are few other spaces where LGBTQ people can truly feel safe. On the surface, the business communities in Canada and the United States, two countries where gay marriage has been legalized, may well believe their workspaces seek to do the same.

Female-led startups find it harder to obtain funding than those led by men; women are often not hired or promoted at the rate of men; and even in the 21st century, women are not paid equally for the same work. The bottom line: the belief that we operate in a meritocracy takes us off the hook from examining the potential for bias in our evaluations of women-led businesses and women leaders.

Investing with a gender lens can create financial and social impact by increasing women’s access to capital, promoting workplace equity, and creating products and services that improve the lives of women and girls.

In turbulent markets, it can be hard for established companies to choose new strategic directions. But by rethinking the past and present and reimagining the future, managers can construct strategic narratives that enable innovation.

Most companies invest a significant amount of time and effort in a formal, annual strategic planning process — but many executives see little benefit from the investment. One manager told us, “Our planning process is like a primitive tribal ritual — there is a lot of dancing, waving of feathers and beating of drums. No one is exactly sure why we do it, but there is an almost mystical hope that something good will come out of it.” Another said, “It’s like the old Communist system: We pretend to make strategy and they pretend to follow it.” Management thinker Henry Mintzberg has gone so far as to label the phrase “strategic planning” an oxymoron. He notes that real strategy is made informally. Our own research on strategic planning supports Mintzberg’s observation: We found that few truly strategic decisions are made in the context of a formal process. But we also found that, when approached with the right goal in mind, formal planning need not be a waste of time and can, in fact, be a real source of competitive advantage. Companies that achieved such success used strategic planning not to generate strategic plans but as a learning tool to create “prepared minds” within their management teams (to paraphrase Louis Pasteur).