Study: Oshawa near bottom of the list for women

By Graeme McNaughton/The Oshawa Express

A new study from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA) finds that the Oshawa area is not a great city to be in if you are a woman in Canada – in fact, it is one of the worst.

According to the recently released document, The Best and Worst Places to be a Woman in Canada 2016: The Gender Gap in Canada’s 25 Biggest Cities, the Oshawa census metropolitan area – which also includes Whitby and Clarington – came in second from the bottom, beating out only Windsor.

This is a steep fall from the 2015 edition of the report, which put Oshawa in the top 10.

Kate McInturff, a senior researcher with the CCPA and the report’s author, says that Oshawa’s spot on the list is primarily due to the amount of women in government – or rather, the absence of them.

“It looks to me like the thing that’s really pushing Oshawa down in the rankings, and also causing some of the difference from last year, is really low levels of women in senior management positions and in elected office,” McInturff tells The Oshawa Express.

“Especially the senior management positions – that seems to have changed since last year. Only 29 per cent of senior managers in Oshawa are women, which is not half and well below the national average.”

In fact, when it comes to the leadership category, the CCPA report ranks Oshawa dead last.

McInturff adds that there are also issues with the income gap between men and women, saying that women in the Oshawa area earn, on average, approximately 68 cents for every dollar a man makes.

The report also says that there are fewer women working full-time positions in the Oshawa area, with numbers coming in at 43 per cent – well below the 61 per cent seen by the male population.

Councillor Nancy Diamond, however, says this does not tell the full story about the role of women in the city.

“It’s rather low with two of us out of 11,” Diamond says, referring to herself and her colleague on council, Councillor Amy McQuaid-England.

“However, I looked at it as out of four standing committees, the two women chair two of the committees. Councillor McQuaid-England and I chair 50 per cent of the standing committees. It depends on which way you want to look at it. And we were elected to those positions by the men on council.”

Diamond adds that women are also at the helm or are at least in high-ranking positions with other important organizations in the city.

“We have women, certainly, in high positions (at the city). And in the community, we have both the president and CEO of the Oshawa Chamber of Commerce that are female. The president of the real estate board, you’ve got high ranking women at UOIT and Durham College,” she says.

Diamond says that in order to get women more involved in politics, people just need to get more interested in what is going on at city hall.

“I would like to see more men and women involved in local politics. We’re sort of the poor country cousins in elected office,” she says.

“Our level of government, to me, is the meat and potatoes of our daily lives in our community, and we are lucky to get 23 or 24 per cent voter turnout. For both men and women, if more would consider that this is important, challenging, can be exciting…it’s just extraordinarily interesting to be able to work on behalf of the community, but we’ve got to get more people who recognize that, as they say, the meat and potatoes part of government is important.”

Diamond says that things have gotten better for Canadian women compared to years past, but that things still stand to improve.

“Years ago when I was first out of school and working, women weren’t even seen as a possibility in the operational side of business. Now, we are everywhere. I look at it as a continuum that we are far ahead of where we were in Canada, not just in Oshawa, but there’s still a long way to go in terms of resources,” Diamond says.

“I also look at it as good business when the majority of Canadian adults are women…any company that doesn’t take advantage of that pool of resources, that capacity for their company, it is eliminating half of their possible employees and half of the possible people to be promoted. That’s not good business sense.”

McInturff says that in order for things to improve, governments need to listen to the organizations in the community working at the ground level.

“There are solutions to many of these problems, and they lie in the community. There are organizations working in the community with the women who are affected by poverty, by violence, who have seen the challenges that folks are facing day to day,” she says.

“They see the kinds of things that are working very well, they see the things that aren’t working so well and it’s really when decision makers take the time to talk to those community organizations, to talk to people in the community, that we can learn a lot about what’s working.”