The Best and Worst Places to be a Woman in Canada 2019 The Gender Gap in Canada’s 26 Biggest Cities

Closing the gender gap is high on the federal agenda. The government has introduced proactive pay equity legislation, elevated Status of Women Canada to a full department and launched Canada’s first feminist international assistance policy. And yet, as this report shows, while we have been making measured progress, women are still waiting for meaningful change in communities across the country. Years of effort to remove entrenched economic, cultural and social barriers to women’s progress are not landing the results we all expected by now. The World Economic Forum’s (WEF) Global Gender Gap Index tells thenational story. Canada eked out only meagre increases in its gender gap score between 2006 and 2016 averaging 0.15 percentage points a year. By 2015, our ranking had fallen from 19th to 30th place and then, in 2016, to 35th place. Canada turned this around by moving up the index to 16th place in 2017 and holding that position in 2018—the direct result of a boost in women’s representation in the federal cabinet after the 2015 election.1 But a closer examination reveals uneven progress across the different factors that determine a country’s place on the WEF gender index. Near perfect scores in the areas of health and educational attainment in Canada have not translated into notable progress on the economic front or in women’s representation in leadership. The CCPA’s Gender Gap Index was created in 2014 to bring a local lens to the discussion of gender disparities across a range of areas related to basic rights. Modelled on established indicator frameworks such as the Global

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