EMPLOYMENT AND INCOME

Canadian women made considerable progress over the Decade in attaining a rate of workforce participation which is closer to that of men.

• Women comprise a steadily increasing proportion of the workforce (now 43%). As in the area of education, the gains women have made in increased workforce participation are a continuation of trends that began more than twenty years before the Decade for women.
  
  
• Increasingly, women are remaining in the workforce throughout their lives.
  
  
• Women appear to have taken the appropriate steps (i.e., increased education and years of service) to qualify themselves for promotion to top-paying jobs in management, administration and the professions.
  
  
• Women's representation improved substantially in management and administrative jobs. Again, progress has been greatest for the best-educated/best qualified women, while the position of more disadvantaged women remained unchanged throughout the Decade.
  
  It should also be noted that, although women's representation among managers has increased, they still do not appear in any significant numbers within the most senior corporate levels.
  
  For example, a recent survey of Ontario Secondary School Teachers (an update of a survey of the same group conducted in 1975), indicated that while more women teachers are being encouraged to become (and have prepared themselves to become) Vice-Principals, Principals and Superintendents, significant and measurable progress for women teachers has occurred mainly in those geographical areas where Affirmative Action policies and procedures have been in place for some time.*

* OSSTF Status of Women Report, Avebury Research and Consulting Limited, 1985.

Women have made much less progress in increasing their participation in non-traditional employment. This lack of progress contributes, in part, to intense competition among women for jobs in traditional female job sectors and to the low pay associated with these jobs.

Over the Decade, women's range of occupational choice increased only slightly and many of the non-traditional areas which had been considered as excellent options for working women had, instead, begun to decline. In addition, futurists predict that there will be a negative impact on the traditional women's sectors of the workforce as office automation becomes more prevalent.

Since it appears that unemployment in traditionally labor-intensive job areas (heavy industry and clerical) will increase for women and men in the years ahead. it is essential that women's representation across the broadest possible range of occupations be increased. Thus, the issue of expanding women's career choices must finally be adequately addressed.