Project: Pro Active Labour Market Policy
Prepared by Barbara Guy

Description
This project involves a comprehensive analysis of approaches and strategies to improving women's equitable access to and participation in the labour market.

Issues to be Addressed

1. Detail/define/analyse the strategies necessary to ensure improvements in women's participation.
   
   
2. Examine barriers to participation and develop proposals for changes to policy and programs in order to meet the diverse and often multiple needs of women. These proposals will be informed by how barriers inter-relate and will embrace a holistic view of women's participation, rather than compartmentalizing their needs.
   
   
3. Identity critical issues (those that have the most impact when resolved) and locate critical points for lobbying at the provincial/territorial level and federal level.
   
   
4. Examine the current policy making process and how it might be influenced. For example, there are policy makers whose notion of equality is formal, and see equality as already achieved. In order to get women's equality on the policy agenda, we will have to show what substantive equality would look like, and demonstrate that we are not there.

Advancing the Status of Women Through this Work
The project will provide:

1. a comprehensive examination of barriers by a diverse and large group of women
2. holistic (interconnected) solutions for addressing the barriers
3. well researched analysis of policy processes and responsibilities
4. arguments for putting women's substantive equality on the policy agenda
5. an opportunity for dialogue among many types of women's organizations to pro-actively address the issue of labour market access
6. strategic targets for the efforts by women's groups to see these barriers addressed in a comprehensive way.

Project Components
The project has the following components:

1. Consultations with women's groups and policy makers
2. Research on past and present labour force development initiatives and how they affect women's equality
3. Research on the impact (or potential impact) of different policies and programs

Consultations with women's groups will form the qualitative part of the research. The information and recommendations will be used to create a web-like model of women's participation so that all needs are seen together, and not in isolation. This will 'connect the dots' for those who need it, and will avoid the compartmentalization of women's needs.

The baseline data and analysis, the strategies, would come from research and consultations. Strategies and reports could be tailored for groups of women by geography or other characteristics such as ethnicity and age. The research would go back and mine older data, or use existing measures such as women's earnings as a percentage of men's, and come up with some comparisons of how women have progressed over time. This will allow us to show some progress (e.g. in pay, labour market participation rates, access to some occupations like law and medicine as well as the slower progress in engineering), and to include some measures of time use (women's extra work) and a quality of workplace survey. The quality of workplace survey is a ground-breaking idea and would serve as a baseline to measure how women feel at work and what they experience there.

Develop a policy framework for women's labour market equality that can be used in government. The framework would provide a comprehensive tool to policy makers and program designers that could be used to assess the degree to which the policy or program moves women closer to the goal of equitable participation in the labour market.

The largest component is the development of many strategies that together form a comprehensive labour force development strategy for women. Types of possible actions range from valuing women's unpaid work to career , counseling, individual actions such as mentoring, pressuring CMEC (Council of Ministers of Education Canada) to include gender specific indicators in their new research on educational processes and outcomes, the criteria for policy formulation mentioned above, pay equity, child care, increased access to training at all levels, workplace acceptance of women in all roles, safety from violence and harassment, and public education.

A final product may be similar to Ninety-nine Steps, the report on violence against women that came out of federal consultations in the early 1990's. It will also be comprehensive in its context setting, its inclusiveness (recognizing that different strategies are necessary for different barriers) and its scope of recommendations for action.