The Pay Gap & the Gendering of Care Work: Women’s Economic Insecurity amid the COVID-19 Crisis

The COVID-19 crisis has exposed long-standing inequalities in unpaid and paid care work – women and girls undertake more than three-quarters of unpaid care work in the world and make up two-thirds of the paid care workforce, according to Oxfam. In Canada, women are disproportionately shouldering the impacts of lockdowns, childcare closures, and overwhelmed health care systems as they “account[ed] for 63% of the one million jobs lost in the early stages of the pandemic…and concentrated in industries hit hardest by economic shutdowns,” all while balancing their participation in the paid workforce with heightened care responsibilities. With women accounting for a majority of frontline workers, and care work being pushed out of the formal economy into the home, the pandemic has exacerbated the gender pay gap.

•Moderated by: Kadie Ward, Commissioner and CAO of the Pay Equity Commission of Ontario

•Panelists: Katherine Scott, Senior Researcher at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives; Karen Jensen, Canada’s Federal Pay Equity Commissioner; Deena Ladd, Executive Director at the Workers’ Action Centre; Rachel Vickerson, Executive Director at the Association of Early Childhood Educators of Ontario; and Valerie Frey, Senior Economist, Directorate for Employment, Labour and Social Affairs at the OECD.