Gender imbalance

While gender disparity is becoming less of an issue in some higher-skilled professions, a new StatsCan study says that it's still a problem when looking at the wider labour picture:

As for women, although they made up less than have (sic) of the population in the workforce, they comprised 55 per cent of the chronically unemployed population. They also made up nearly two-thirds of the population that never found a job during the study period.

"Lone parents were especially over-represented among the chronically unemployed and the always unemployed. These were mainly women, as they head the vast majority of lone-parent families," StatsCan said in its report.

Lest there be any doubt, this wasn't a matter of the women in the study choosing to stay home with children. Membership in the labour force is based on attempts to find work, meaning that stay-at-home months may be a factor in the lower percentage of females in the workforce to begin with.

Instead, women in general and single mothers in particular are having a significantly tougher time finding jobs when making an attempt. And that suggests that there are still systemic factors (even if far less direct than once existed) operating against equality in the workplace - both in who's working to begin with, and in how much they get paid.