With the Throne Speech promise of an Action Plan for Women in the Economy, the federal government committed to ensuring an intersectional feminist response to economic recovery from the pandemic. Canadian Women’s Foundation, the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, and the Ontario Nonprofit Network joined together to offer essential recommendations on how to make this inclusive plan a reality and have published a report titled Recovery through Equality: Developing an Inclusive Action Plan for Women and the Economy.
The report outlines how women are being pushed out of paid work at historic rates due to the COVID-19 pandemic, especially those in precarious jobs and those who have to sacrifice paid hours for unpaid child and elder care.
Centering marginalized women and focusing on initiatives in fragile women-majority sectors – many of them undervalued care sectors – can provide women with the broadest and deepest pandemic economic recovery.
The report outlines two key approaches:
- Overcome barriers to women’s participation in paid employment by investing in early learning and child care, violence against women, gender-based violence services, and accommodations for women with disabilities, and other women have struggled to find a foothold in the labour market
- Create the public infrastructure necessary to spur the creation of decent work and shared prosperity for all, by investing in the care economy, including health care and elder care, decent work for those at the margins or left out of the labour market, modernizing income security to protect women in today’s labour market and reducing income inequality by expanding programs that support women in the workforce.
