Women in the work force work largely in female job ghettoes, with little opportunity for advancement. On average, women make 59% for every dollar earned by men. The economic condition of women has not improved since the time of the Royal Commission, it has gotten worse. More women are in the labour force, more women are doing a double shift, one in the labour force and one at home, but in global statistical terms, women's economic condition has not budgeted.

What must happen now is that women must indicate clearly to their elected representatives and to the business sector that this cannot go on. In good times, we made not a dent in this situation. Now that it is bad times, we hear that society cannot afford to pay women a just wage. We must make it clear that we will not tolerate having women pay the price for this injustice. We must insist on a comprehensive approach to the barriers which prevent women from having the economic rights which by justice should be ours. We must have mandatory affirmative action, and contract compliance to get more women into better jobs. We must have accessible affordable child care. We must legislate equal pay for work of equal value so that public health nurses, -- mostly women -- for example, no longer earn less than people collecting garbage -- mostly men -- and equal access to training and retraining for women.

The great current danger is that technological change will make women's employment lives even more precarious than they already are. The great opportunity comes from four things--the change in consciousness of most women on women's issues; the growth of activism in extra-parliamentary political institutions in Canada; the existence of the Charter of Rights, whose equality provisions come into effect in April, 1985; and the up- coming federal election and the politics which surround that.

First, the change in consciousness: The University of Michigan has studied the self-identifications of women in the United States, their sense of being implicated in women's issues. In the past few years they have discovered that more than 60% of women think of themselves as belonging to a group called "women" with distinct political and social interests and values of their own, which are not always the same as the interests of men. That is an enormous leap forward in women's sense of themselves as constituting a group. After all, women have often been difficult to perceive as a distinct group, since within the group of women are enormous diversities of class, race and historical experience. But in the past decade, despite those differences, the majority of women self-identify as a group with specific concerns and interests of our own. It is from this sense of having a different political interest, that we get phenomena like the gender gap-voting patterns of women differing from those of men based on having different priorities than do most men. For most women social services are higher on the list of priorities than they are for men. This "gender gap" translates into a different voting pattern for women, a statistically measurable difference which can translate into differences in who gets elected, depending on how many women vote. One way I can tell that this is significant is that the people who want no change at all deny very loudly that such a gender gap exists. They sound to me as though they're scared. Politicians of all parties are trying to Marshall what they see as a women's vote.

Next--the growth of activism based on issue: trend analysts in Canada have noticed an enormous growth in what they call the extra-parliamentary institutions. This consists of organized groups interested in a wide range of political issues, groups which want to make a political impact, but which do not perceive the standard party-political system to have served their interest--groups which have something to contribute but feel excluded from the political process. A significant number of the active people in these groups, those seen as leaders, are women, even when the issues under consideration are not strictly women's issues. It seems that the traditional voluntary sector, where women have always been highly significant, has become more politically active and sophisticated, and that the groups which are burgeoning are the ones in which people feel they can get their ideas and visions put forward and worked on. It's very interesting and hopeful that the features of feminist groups--less hierarchy, concern for getting the best vision from everyone's ideas, allowing people power in their own lives and institutions--are among the features of the newly growing extra- parliamentary institutions, which offer a challenge to our existing political structures and practices. The growth of this sector has brought out people not previously politically active-they have come into political action because of an issue, and a new sense of possibility. Many of them are women, and the political style which they value is one which needs to become part of our more formal political institutions.