Equality: women do better in unionized workplaces

On this International Women's Day I encourage everyone to please check out the Canadian Labour Congress home page, to see exactly how bad the wage gap between women and their male counterparts has actually grown.

According to the facts, it just doesn't pay to be a woman in Canada. It doesn't matter where we live. It doesn't matter what we do. It doesn't matter how much we or our parents have invested in a good education. At the end of the day, when women go to work, they get paid less than men.

In fact, over the past ten years, young women have done everything they were told to do to get ahead economically young women have put off starting a family so they could earn a post-secondary degree and build a career and now, they are actually worse off. The wage gap between them and their male counterparts has actually grown.

Shocking, isn't it? After more than a generation of equal participation in the workforce and at a point where younger women make up the majority of students at so many of our colleges and universities today, we're still not equal when it comes to the value that's placed on the work that women do in Canada.

The evidence can be found in a new report from the Canadian Labour Congress made public just in time for International Women's Day, March 8th.

According to this report, prepared by the Canadian Labour Congress, women in Canada who worked full-time, full-year jobs in 2005 earned just 70½ cents for every dollar earned by men in full-time, full-year jobs.