WOMEN'S HISTORY MONTH 1998
Canadian Women
Making an Impact
Theme
The theme for Women's History Month 1998 was Canadian Women - Making an Impact.
Material
Selections of the WHM 1998 booklet Canadian Women - Making an Impact are available below:
View WHM 1998 booklet in Acrobat 5 (17 pages, 646 KB)
View WHM 1998 booklet in HTML
1998 marks the seventh year that Canada will celebrate Women's History Month (WHM) in October in recognition of the women who have played such a vital role in our Canadian heritage. This is an opportunity to instill a sense of pride in our historical origins as well as provide role models for other women - young and old.
With this year's theme, The Business of Women: an evolving story, we will look at how two important areas are unfolding - entrepreneurship and unpaid work. This material highlights advancements and challenges ahead for women as entrepreneurs and as the major providers of household work, caregiving and volunteer work - both of which contribute hugely to the economic and social structure of Canadian life.
While business and unpaid work may seem worlds apart, there are significant links to be made. Women entrepreneurs often cite the skills they learned in running a household or doing volunteer work and those observed in their own mothers as extremely beneficial in helping them run their businesses.
With women making up the fastest-growing segment of entrepreneurs and creating some 1.7 million jobs each year, this makes women crucial to Canada's economy. Ironically, many of the same women who run businesses and contribute to economic growth in this country still provide a disproportionate amount of household and caregiving activities as well as volunteer work.
Fortunately in Canada, the government has done important work through time-use surveys to measure how Canadians spend their time, at all forms of economic activity. And in 1996, the Census included questions on unpaid work for the first time. This marks a further step in the right direction as governments re-evaluate the economic and social implications of various types of paid and unpaid work. Within these pages we'll look at the irony known as "double shift" and other evidence of how women's spheres of activities have expanded over the last century. This way we will celebrate the wonderfully rich heritage of Canadian women.
In a trend consistent with other developed countries around the world,
Canadian women are now leaders in job creation and in generating economic
growth. With that in mind, it's time to either put an end to or at least
redefine the term "women's work." It could be argued that in the
late 1990s, "women's work" means helping drive the economic engine
of the country. What it still too often refers to is household work, caring
for children and elderly parents and volunteer work - in other words, unpaid
work.
While women continue to carry too much responsibility for this kind of
work, important progress has been made in reducing women's chances of facing
"double shift," that is going home to more hours of work after
spending a full day on the job. In fact, Canada is a recognized world leader
in developing ways to measure and value unpaid work. Statistics Canada first
estimated the dollar value of housework performed in Canada as early as 1971
and conducted two major time-use surveys in 1986 and 1992. The 1996 Census
included questions on time spent on unpaid work for the first time. On the
international front, the Platform for Action, adopted at the World Conference
on Women in Beijing in 1995, called for governments to measure unpaid work
and reflect its value in satellite accounts to the Gross Domestic Product
(GDP). The Platform for Action also said that this information should be used
for the development of policy.
However, we must remember the Canadian women who often lacked appreciation
for their work as wives, mothers, unpaid business partners, caregivers to
elderly parents, substitute workers during the world wars and volunteers who
help their communities.
1971 - A Statistics Canada report estimates
that household work represents 41% of Canada's Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
1978 - Statistics Canada publishes a study
on the approaches to valuing unpaid work in monetary terms, entitled
Estimating the Value of Unpaid Work in Canada
1981 - Statistics Canada conducts the first
national survey of time use as a pilot study.
1985 - Statistics Canada publishes its second
set of estimates of the value of non-market activities in the home, entitled
The Value of Household Work in Canada, 1981
1986 - Statistics Canada conducts its first
time-use survey as part of the General Social Survey program. Other General
Social Surveys that provide data on unpaid work include the Family History
Survey (1990) and the Health and Social Support module (1985).
1988 - Marilyn Waring publishes If Women
Counted, a New Feminist Economics, which makes the case for a
re-evaluation of the economic contributions of household work and volunteer
work by women.
1990 - Commonwealth Ministers Responsible
for Women's Affairs agree to fully recognize the paid and unpaid contribution
of women and to promote their equitable share in the rewards and benefits
accruing to the economy.
1993 - The first Canadian-organized
International Conference on the Measurement and Valuation of Unpaid Work is
held thanks to co-convenors, Status of Women Canada (SWC) and Statistics
Canada. In addition to helping organize the conference, the federal government
provided funding for Canadian women's groups to participate.
1993 - In December, Statistics Canada
releases a report entitled Dual Earners: Who's Responsible for
Housework? which concludes that although housework is usually shared more
equitably as women's education level and earning power grow, women perform
the majority of housework (65.9%), especially as the number of children
increases, regardless of their working status.
1994 - Statistics Canada publishes its fourth
study on the value of household work, The Value of Household Work in
Canada, 1992. The value of household work is estimated at between
$210.8 billion and $318.8 billion, depending upon the method used.
1995 - The UN Fourth World Conference on
Women in Beijing calls for national and international statistical
organizations to measure unpaid work and reflect its value in satellite
accounts to the GDP. This represents a 20-year long, grass-roots movement
that involved more than 1,200 non-government organizations led by the
International Women Count Network, which includes Canadian members.
1995 - The UN Human Development Report
announces that women's unpaid and undervalued work is worth $11 trillion
annually worldwide. It says that three-fourths of men's work is in paid
market activities compared with only one-third of women's work.
1995 - Statistics Canada releases
Households' Unpaid Work: Measurement and Valuation, an in-depth
report on the measurement and valuation of unpaid work in Canada, along with
revised estimates for 1961-1992 and examination of changes in households'
unpaid work over time. (Cat. No. 13-603, No. 3)
1996 - The first Canadian Census to collect
data on unpaid work focuses on dependent care as critical and urgent unpaid
work issue of public policy interest. It confirms the patterns of time-use
surveys and will enable further analysis of paid and unpaid work patterns for
different population groups across the country. Inclusion of these type of
questions in the Census is the result of much hard work and commitment on
the part of grass-roots, Canadian women's organizations.
1996 - Statistics Canada releases The
Statistics Canada Total Work Accounts System which includes a wide-ranging
survey of possible fields of application of a Total Work Accounts System
concept and data relevant to researchers and public policy people.
(Cat. No. 89-549-XPE/EXP in French)
1997 - A coalition of women's groups led by
Mothers are Women holds a policy symposium on unpaid work.
1997 - Federal/Provincial/Territorial
Ministers Responsible for Status of Women release Economic Gender Equality
Indicators. Unpaid work is central to the development of the 'work' indicators.
1998 - The federal Budget includes a tax
credit for unpaid work by caregivers.
Businesses led by more than 700,000 women
create jobs for some 1.7 million Canadians
- more than the Canadian Business Top 100 companies combined. This is
four times the rate of the average firm.
Some 46% of new small businesses are led by
women, making up nearly one-third of all firms in Canada.
While 45.6% businesswomen still operate in
the retail trade sector, some 54.4% are evenly
distributed throughout all other sectors in Canada. In fact, the number of
retail trade and personal services firms owned by women declined between 1991
and 1994, while the numbers grew in such sectors as agribusiness, mining,
financial/insurance/real estate, communications, construction, manufacturing,
transportation and business services.
Overall, businesswomen in these sectors tend to be younger than their male
counterparts. Almost 50% of the women are younger than 45 while nearly
two thirds of the men are over 45.
The number of women-led companies grew in every province between 1991 and
1994. Prince Edward Island has the lowest number with
3,600 companies run by women and Ontario leads with 248,500.
Women's businesses show a comparable rate of survival as the average
business. In fact, 76% of women-led companies in existence in 1991 were still
around in 1994, compared to 78% of all firms. Statistics also show their
firms are as likely to pay their bills on time as the average commercial
venture.
In 1995, the incorporation rate for businesses owned by women was highest
in construction and manufacturing.
The growth rate for the self-employed women business sector from 1975 to
1990 was 172.8% with 521,000 self-employed women in Canada in 1990.
This gave the self-employed women employment sector the fastest growth rate of
all employment sectors during that time.
In 1990, 9.3% of all employed women in Canada
were self-employed, up from 5.6% in 1975.
Up to 70% of businesses started by women were
started in the home.
In one survey, the majority of self-employed women interviewed
(60-81%) founded their own business, 9-29% purchased their business
and 5% inherited their business.
In a Quebec survey, the majority of women entrepreneurs (about 71%)
had three dollars or more equity to every dollar of debt and about 81% planned
to completely eliminate or at least reduce their business's debt load.
Most surveys show that women tend to use their personal savings to fund
new ventures, followed by loans from banks or other financial
institutions.
Up to 68.8% of surveyed women-owned
businesses are solely owned.
According to Statistics Canada, in 1990, 32.7% of women-owned
businesses had paid help, up from 23.6% in 1975.
About one quarter of self-employed women were born outside Canada
and among employed women, immigrant women have slightly greater tendency than
Canadian-born women toward self-employment.
According to a cross-section of surveys, the two major barriers experienced
by women in starting or operating a business are difficulties in obtaining
financial and a disproportionate responsibility for family
responsibilities.
The two major challenges facing women operating a home-based business are
distractions by family, friends and household tasks and a lack of
dedicated space for their business.
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