The rise and stall of Canada's gender-equity revolution.

Guppy, Neil ; Luongo, Nicole

IN 1929, AFTER DECADES of cultural and legal exclusion, the Privy Council of the United Kingdom formally acknowledged Canadian women as "persons." Since then changes in gender relations have radically remodeled both Canada and the western world. Women have achieved positions of power, won significant social and legal entitlements, and made their role as vital contributors to the national economy more visible. Yet, even with these advances, full gender parity remains a future achievement: The revolution is unfinished (Hochschild and Machung [1989] 2012; see also England 2010; Esping-Andersen 2009).

The full success of the gender-equity revolution matters for several reasons, the most important being that arbitrary inequalities violate basic human rights. Additionally, attaining full gender equity will enable women to contribute more fully to economic development and to overall societal well-being. Promoting gender equality for all helps to improve the lives of doubly or triply marginalized populations, including those who are differently abled or experience ancestral, racial, ethnic, or class-based discrimination.

We address three distinct but interrelated issues. We begin by examining progress toward gender parity in Canada. We do this by charting gender equity over time along various key dimensions and, briefly, by assessing the evolution of gender-related policy provisions. The dimensions are as follows: economic participation and opportunity, educational attainment, political empowerment, and domestic labor.

Although an extensive body of research exists on each separate dimension (e.g., Baker 2011b; Benoit 2000; Fortin and Huberman 2002), this is the first time comparative Canadian historical data of this sort has been assembled to chart broad trends in gender equity. We thus offer an analysis of gender equity that is comprehensive, quantifiable, and historical. It is also theoretically informed, as we critically examine how far the movement toward gender egalitarianism has reached and why it has recently stalled and been significantly uneven. Finally, we conclude by recommending policy interventions for reigniting the revolution. By linking historical data to future policy, we contribute a long-range overview of gender relations in Canada that is not available elsewhere.

Several assumptions underlie our project. First, charting the position of women relative to men, as we do, effectively asks about the "masculinization" of women's lives. It further dichotomizes gender and sexuality, an assumption that is increasingly problematic in view of transgendered identities and greater sexual fluidity (Siltanen and Doucet 2008). We proceed on the grounds that the opportunities of women and men ought to be equal, although not necessarily the same, and that assessing such equality requires comparison. Second, the grounds for comparison are not gender blind. The evidence we use, official statistics for the most part, privileges certain ways of understanding while limiting others (e.g., what counts as labor force participation is historically gendered; see Thomas 2010). Third, a more nuanced research design would make more central the feminization of men's lives and would recognize that women and men lead lives that are crosscut by a range of other social determinants, be they ancestry, disability, or social class. Historically, the struggles of marginalized communities have been erased or co-opted by homogenizing social forces that benefit the lives of the more powerful, particularly white, middle, and upper class women and men. The consequence of all this, however, is that a historical project entailing a more nuanced research design would be impossible given the quality of the evidence accessible.

GENDERED TRAJECTORIES: THEORY AND METHOD

Canada's gender-equity revolution has provided greater autonomy for women. It began with the simple recognition of women, as symbolized by the Person's Case (1929), and subsequently expanded to include benchmarks of equality and inclusion. Its triggers remain debated but have to do with both general social changes and very specific alterations to practices and policies. The standard theoretical explanation in sociology (Jackson 1998, 2006), argues that the institutional power of commerce, education, and politics has increased relative to the power of the family, the latter a private patriarchal domain where, historically, men ruled. Women gained greater autonomy as they participated more fully in increasingly powerful, more public institutions. The driving force for gender equity resulted from "modern economic and political organization interacting with women's continuous resentment of and resistance to subordination" (Jackson 2006:216; see also England 2006). This heightened autonomy for women has occurred simultaneously to, and is at least partially responsible for, the rise in language and legislation about broader equalities of opportunity and human rights.

Additional factors that increased women's participation in the public sphere included the abolition of marriage banns (Esping-Andersen 2009) and of marriage bars (Buddie 2010:39; Goldin 1991:160-79). Three other monumental changes ignited by the feminist movement--the enhanced availability of birth control technologies, access to legalized abortion, and the implementation of robust divorce laws--contributed to even greater bodily and legal autonomy for women. While these social changes helped initiate and reinforce the movement toward gender equity, progress has been uneven and looks to have recently stalled.

As primary evidence for the trends examined in the first part of the paper, we rely on official statistics for women and men that provide a historical sweep over the four dimensions noted earlier--economics, education, politics, and domestic labor. We began by searching for evidence of changes in gendered patterns of action spanning as much of the last century as possible. In a methodological note at the end of the article we provide greater detail, but most of the data we assemble are gleaned from comparative historical statistics collected either by Statistics Canada or Elections Canada. We present summary data in figures to facilitate the interpretation of broad patterns. Evidence of progressive change is easy to see, as are signs of stalling. Our graphs do not capture issues of unevenness since the latter is only applicable to population subgroups, but we provide numerous citations to longitudinal research that demonstrates unevenness in gender parity.

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ECONOMIC PARTICIPATION AND OPPORTUNITY

We begin by examining the participation rates of women and men in the paid workforce. In the early twentieth century, male labor force participation was at virtually 100 percent while comparatively few women worked for pay. Those women in the labor force tended to be single or very poor and were often employed in domestic-type roles or, to a lesser extent, office work or teaching. By the end of WWI, about 20 percent of women were counted in the paid labor force, a percentage that grew to just under 30 percent by WWII (see Figure 1). During this time the vast majority of women exited the labor market at marriage, either because of strong social norms against married women working for pay or because of formal marriage bars. Especially during the Depression of the 1930s, when jobs were hard to find, men's employment was prioritized. The ban on married women working in the federal government was not lifted until 1955 (Ursel 1992).

Figure 1 shows dramatic changes in labor force participation. Most significantly, women's participation accelerated in the early 1950s and continued growing until the late 1980s. This is shown most clearly for women aged 25 to 44 (where the narrower age cohort removes the effect of expanding school enrollment while highlighting the period of family formation). In the span of 40 years, right after WWII, the labor force participation of women aged 25 to 44 rose from just over 20 percent to just over 80 percent. If the focus is upon married women, where the available time series is shorter, the percentage of married women in the labor force grew from about 4 percent in 1941 to just over 60 percent in the 1980s. The reasons for this growth are multifaceted and include the insistence by women of their right to, and need for, their own income, the expansion of part-time work, the removal of marriage bars, the adoption of household technologies, including family planning technologies, the increasing need for dual earner families, and the coincident rise in the service sector of the economy.

It is notable that, subsequent to the 1980s, the growth in women's labor force participation has stalled. In the 25 years from 1963 to 1988, women's labor force participation (for those 25-44) increased by almost 50 percent, whereas in the last 25 years it has nudged up only 7 percent. As we note below, this is unlikely to change unless significant policy revisions occur, such as universal child care. Even more recently, from 2012 to the present, the female labor force participation rate has been falling, in part because immigrant women are having trouble entering the labor force (DePratto 2014). This is further evidence of stalling, and of the unevenness in gender equity (see also Elrick and Lightman 2014; Fuller and Stecy-Hildebrandt 2014). Furthermore, while part-time employment helped fuel the early growth of women's participation in the labor force, since the mid-1970s the percentage of women working part-time has remained constant at about 25 percent.

Women also created a significant occupational shift in the labor force. While women continue to be employed in what used to be considered traditional jobs, such as librarian, nurse, secretary, and teacher, a growing number of women chose to pursue nontraditional jobs, such as doctor, lawyer, manager, and professor. In 1931, only about 6 of every 100 women employed in these eight jobs were in the latter grouping, whereas by 2011 that ratio had grown to 44 of every 100 (calculations from 1931 Census and 2011 National Household Survey; see also Davies and Guppy 2014:140). Consistent with evidence from the Global Gender Gap project (Hausmann et al. 2014), women in Canada have seen their share of senior management jobs rise from 21 percent in 1987 to 31.6 percent in 2009, and in business and finance occupations their share has risen from 38.3 to 51.2 percent (Statistics Canada 2011:127). Among young people (aged 25-34) occupational sex segregation decreased between 1991 and 2011 mainly because of women entering male-dominated jobs (as opposed to either men entering female-dominated jobs or changes in the size of occupations dominated by one or the other sex; Uppal and LaRochelle-Cote 2014:10). Despite these changes, women's ascent to the highest ranks of senior management and corporate board positions remains stalled (Caranci, Preston, and Labelle 2013).

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As more women began working full-time, full-year, as they entered more managerial and professional occupations, and as equal pay victories increased, the wage trajectory for women began to catch up to that of men. Figure 2 charts this rise of women's median earnings relative to men's. The growth has been reasonably linear although, if the series is divided in half, the slope for the earlier 22 years (b = 0.39) is slightly steeper than for the last 22 years (b = 0.31) consistent with, although weaker than, earlier evidence of a stall in gender equity. Drolet (2011:11) makes the important point that, if hourly wages are used to make comparisons, the gap has narrowed even more (but with a shorter time series), although she too notes that "there are only moderate declines in the wage gap for younger women from cohort to cohort"--again consistent with earlier stall evidence (see also Baker and Drolet 2010).

Among the more significant consequences of this shrinking gap, three impacts stand out. First, married or cohabiting women are contributing more to household incomes and are thus gaining greater economic power among couples. In 2008, women earned more than men in just under 30 percent of dual-earner families, an increase from about 10 percent in 1976 (Statistics Canada 2011:153). Second, the gap has declined in part because of greater educational and occupational attainment for women (Baker and Drolet 2010:450). Because these same women are often married to equally successful men, recent decades have seen growing inequalities between families (and the attendant knock-on effects for future generations; see below). The latter is also related to the growth of women among those tax filers comprising the top 1 percent of earners, where women's share has grown from 11.4 percent in 1982 to 21.3 percent in 2012 (Cansim 204-0002). Third, the gender wage gap is larger among lower income earners, evidence of the uneven nature of the gender-equity revolution (Olivetti and Petrongolo 2014).

Several factors account for the narrowing earnings gap, including the occupational shift we noted above, victories in pay equity struggles, and the greater educational attainment of women that we note below. There is clearly a cohort-replacement effect occurring as well, whereby younger cohorts--in which women and men entering the labor market are more alike than in the past--"replace" older cohorts who would be more dissimilar, particularly in terms of education and experience (Drolet 2011). This cohort effect is further influenced by the decline of manufacturing jobs in which males typically earned higher wages, and the rise of women's rates of unionization, particularly in the public sector.

EDUCATIONAL ATTAINMENT

In 1970, the Royal Commission on the Status of Women noted that "Changes in education could bring dramatic improvements in the social and economic position of women in an astonishingly short time" (Canada 1970:161). When it was released, women were receiving 38 percent of undergraduate and first-professional degrees, whereas that number now stands at 61 percent. As Figure 3 demonstrates, beginning in the 1960s and continuing until the early 2000s, women soared ahead in attaining degrees although recently the growth has plateaued for all degrees.

Even though, aside from PhDs, women now outnumber men in graduation rates, the selection of field of study remains sharply divided along gendered lines. Women are underrepresented in the "STEM" disciplines-science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and computer science--and especially engineering. In 2011, women aged 25 to 34 received 66 percent of undergraduate and first professional degrees, yet they obtained only 39 percent of all STEM degrees (Hango 2013b). Furthermore, men with lower mathematics test scores (on PISA) are significantly more likely to enter and graduate from STEM degree fields than are women who, at age 15, achieved higher mathematics scores (Hango 2013a).

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Figure 4 follows enrollment in four selected fields of study between 1911 and 2005. Medicine shows a clear pattern of female ascendance: In 1911, only 24 women were enrolled (1.5 percent of the class) but by 2005 there were 4,904 women enrolled (58.7 percent). This pattern is typical of most fields of study (as Figure 3 implies). Engineering is a discipline where women have made modest inroads but as a STEM field it shows evidence of stalled participation in the 2000s (20 percent female). In education, the pattern initially moved toward equity in enrollments but, in the last half-century, this field has seen sharply higher female enrollments. Finally, nursing illustrates a pattern typical of several traditional female fields where male enrollments have been weak (note that social work and veterinary medicine have feminized recently). Overall, as Davies and Guppy (2014:140) illustrate, there is erosion in gender segregation at the undergraduate level between the early 1960s and 2009, but the pace of change as measured by the index of qualitative variation has slowed.

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POLITICAL EMPOWERMENT

Although some women were able to vote on school or local matters, they could not vote at the provincial level until 1916 to 1917, and at the federal level until 1918; even then, only women who were over 20, who were British subjects, and who met specified provincial property ownership requirements, were allowed to vote. Universal suffrage came in 1920, although it was not until later that people of non-British heritage (1940) and of Aboriginal descent (1960) gained the franchise (Elections Canada 2007). In 1921, in the first election where women were eligible to hold office, Agnes Macphail won a seat--which she held for 19 years. Prior to the election of 1940, only one other woman joined Macphail, and after that women's participation stuttered until nine women won a seat in 1974 (see Figure 5). There was steady progress after that until the 1997 election, when 62 women won seats. Since 1997, however, the pace of progress has slowed.

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We note, too, that political participation has stalled with less than one-quarter of the seats in the House of Commons occupied by women (ranking Canada 61st among 189 nations in 2014; Inter-Parliamentary Union Web site, http://www.ipu.org/). Similar patterns hold at the municipal and provincial levels (Tolley 2011). Only one woman, Kim Campbell, has ever served as Prime Minister, and she lost in the only election in which she ran as incumbent Prime Minister. Although other women have occupied Cabinet posts, the representation here, too, falls short of equity and has been highly uneven depending on which party has been in power as well as the timing of elections (with parties providing women with temporary cabinet promotions just prior to elections).

DOMESTIC LABOR

Early and pioneering work by Canadian scholars examining the household division of labor conclusively demonstrated that women performed the largest share of housework, even when working full-time in the labor force. Luxton (1980) described how working class women in Flin Flon did almost all of the domestic labor in the home, a finding that paralleled Meissner et al.'s (1975) earlier work from Vancouver.

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More recent evidence, both in Canada and internationally, has shown modest advances in the sharing of childcare and housework (Gimenez-Nadal and Sevilla 2012). According to Marshall (2008) there has been a slow "convergence of gender roles" with respect to household and family duties. Marshall's (2008) longitudinal evidence, consistent with both the Canadian and international findings of Gimenez-Nada and Sevilla (2012), relies on time-use data for 20- to 29-year-olds from 1986, 1998, and 2010. She finds that during this period the gender gap in housework shrank from 1.2 more hours for women per day, to only 0.4 more hours per day (see Figure 6). Importantly, it was principally changes in women's time use, not men's, which produced the convergence (including lower fertility and more paid work for women). Concentrating on dual-earning married couples with children did not change this basic convergence finding.

Complementary evidence by Kan, Sullivan, and Gershuny (2011) shows that between 1970 to 1975 and 1995 to 1999, the gender gap in minutes per day that Canadians aged 20 to 59 devoted to domestic work shrank from 3.3 to 2.0 hours. These researchers also show that, in Canada and elsewhere, domestic labor continues to be segregated into blue and pink jobs, with women disproportionately doing routine housework and childcare, and men concentrating most on nonroutine domestic labor (e.g., fixing things). This shows the continued segregation of housework, despite modest gender convergence over time. Furthermore, these researchers demonstrate that institutional policies, which vary by country and time, have real consequences for the pace of gender convergence, a point we turn to in the next section. Finally, Kan et al. (2011:237) detect across all of their cases a "slowing of this trend" in gender convergence, mainly due to a slowing of male engagement with domestic chores, a finding consistent with our stalling interpretation.

GENDER EQUITY POLICIES

Women's greater and more diverse participation within the public sphere clearly signals a major transformation in the social fabric of modern Canada. A second indicator of this revolutionary change is marked by public policies beneficial to gender equity. These policies, often legislated in reaction to, and not as causes of, the changes noted above, are also important in pinpointing where change might be required to complete the revolution.

In this section we quickly review policies that bear directly on women's public-sphere participation, taking our lead from the Gender Gap Report (Hausmann et al. 2014). We also examine, although briefly, the degree to which the types of recommendations being advanced to promote greater gender equity have changed since the 1970 Royal Commission on the Status of Women, a bellwether call for policy action in Canada.

Parental Leave Provisions

Women's labor force participation has risen significantly (Figure 1), with currently about 70 percent of married women with children under three employed (Cansim 282-0210; a fraction virtually unchanged for the past decade but that was just over 30 percent in 1976). The establishment of stronger family-leave provisions for childcare seems essential (Marshall 2008; Pulkingham and van der Gaag 2004). Since 1971, Canada has had a tripartite structure of family-leave provisions, including job protection, employer-provided benefits, and paid leave via employment insurance (with some provincial variation). Protected employment leave covers up to 52 to 54 weeks in most provinces, and up to 70 weeks in Quebec. With few exceptions, most employers do not top up basic provisions: A paid leave of 50 weeks typically includes only a portion of insurable earnings (up to 55 percent with a cap of $485 per week, although for low-income families the cap can rise to 80 percent; rates in Quebec are higher). Importantly, although leave provisions might significantly affect child development, increased leave provisions have not had a positive, lingering impact on women's (or men's) labor-force participation (Milligan 2014).

Paid paternity leave, which offers employed men the option to spend more time with newborn children, is underutilized (McKay, Marshall, and Doucet [2012] estimate that only 33 percent of eligible men took paternity leave in 2008). Further evidence of men's reluctance to take on greater childcare responsibilities is the stalled take-up rates for days missed from work for personal or family responsibilities when there are preschool children at home--1.8 days in 1997 rose to only 1.9 days in 2014, whereas corresponding numbers for women were 4.1 and 3.9 days (Cansim 279-0033; Work Absence Rates). These gender differences indicate that there is significant room for men to contribute more to childcare, a contribution that would do much to promote gender equity.

Childcare

Although for the majority of Canadian families, whether married or common law, dual earning is the norm, social policy to optimize an appropriate work-family balance has not been forthcoming. Unlike many European nations, Canada lacks any semblance of a national daycare program. While a substantial amount of state funding does flow to families who have children, the use of that funding is dependent on how the family chooses to spend it. The money flows mainly as a Universal Child Care Benefit for children under six ($1,200 annually), and as a child tax benefit (replacing the older family allowance model) that targets funding to lower income families.

Quebec recently changed its baby bonus financial incentive scheme into a state-supported childcare program. No other province has such a scheme and, in general, Canada puts more resources into middle and late childhood (school-aged) programs than it does into early childhood programming (aged 1-5; see Beaujot, Du, and Ravanera 2013; Thevenon 2011). The utility of having a universal as opposed to a targeted program has been questioned, although the idea that some form of childcare program is necessary has been widely supported (see Baker 2011a). Stalker and Ornstein (2013) show that the Quebec program has assisted labor force participation by women and, simultaneously, has enhanced gender equity in the household division of labor. The continuing debate, and therefore lack of action, regarding a greater investment in early childhood speaks to the stalling of policy that would support gender equity progress (for an alternative interpretation see Hallgrimsdottir, Benoit, and Phillips 2013). Furthermore, the need to take time off work to care for elderly parents is a growing issue for Canadian families, again stressing the need for better work-family arrangements.

Employment Policy

Legislation prohibiting sex discrimination (e.g., Charter of Rights and Freedoms) and promoting equal rights (e.g., equal pay for work of equal value, employment equity) were initiated largely in response to the feminist movement and women's heightened labor-force participation. Further, while these laws have cultural significance as signals of a new rhetoric of equality, evidence demonstrating that they have effectively promoted gender equity is scarce (although certain court cases have been beneficial, such as the Supreme Court ruling on the Canadian International Airlines proceedings that defined comparable cases for pay equity; see Bernstein, Dupuis, and Vallee 2009). In general, while legislation to promote gender equity has "had a definite positive effect," (Bernstein et al. 2009:495), most commentators point to a series of problems with these policies (Newman and Waite 2012:225-27).

Perhaps most significantly, labor laws often cater to the typical experience of male workers while ignoring the precarious, temporary nature of a significant portion of women's paid work (Vosko and Thomas 2014). A second problem is "rights without remedies," where workers bear rights but have limited opportunity for seeking redress. Complaints-based systems require workers to prove injustice, which can be difficult or impossible especially when a worker is not unionized (Vosko 2013). Third, the voluntary nature of some anti-discrimination laws places little onus on employers to confront gender-based inequities in practices that differentially impact low-wage workers, a sector that is heavily populated by females (e.g., employment-equity law).

New Family Forms

A major shift in household income has come in the transition from an era of the male breadwinner to the modern phase of dual earning couples. This has necessitated alterations in family policy, several of which we noted earlier as important stimuli for the growth in women's employment. These include legislation to ban marriage bars, and increased public access to safe abortions and family-planning technology.

The growth in the public acceptance of new family forms, as well as policy support for these forms, has been critical to expanding women's autonomy. Certainly, legal support for same-sex marriage has provided one important alternative to the traditional family. And the gradual legal acceptance of common-law relationships as equivalent to marriage has provided additional options while also affording greater recognition of property divisions should such relationships dissolve. Furthermore, more women and men are choosing childlessness as an option. Among women over 50, childlessness increased from 14.1 percent in 1990 to 20.4 percent in 2011 (General Social Survey, special tabulation; see also Ravanera and Beaujot 2014). Although there is ongoing resistance to some of these changes, in particular to abortion and same-sex marriage, it is clear that the variety of options for living arrangements has expanded over the last century.

The unevenness of change in gender equity can also been seen here. The feminization of poverty, once a major concern, has largely been eradicated in Canada (based on the 2011 figures for after-tax income, 8.7 percent of men and 8.9 percent of women fell below the Statistics Canada low-income line that year; Cansim 202-0802). For women and men who are lone parents, however, the income gap differs significantly. Not only is the proportion of women living in poverty as lone parents double that of men (21.2 vs. 12.4 percent, respectively), but the number of poor families headed by a single woman as opposed to a single man is over eight times greater (341,000 vs. 42,000, respectively; Cansim 202-0804), even though male lone parent families are increasing faster (Cansim 111-0011). Of course, women and men in other vulnerable groups suffer disproportionately from poverty, including the disabled, recent immigrants, and Aboriginal peoples, but in these subgroups the gender gaps are not as pronounced.

Policy Recommendations over Time

An alternative perspective on policy evolution comes from contemplating historically the policy recommendations of the 1970 Royal Commission on the Status of Women. A simple thought experiment is to consider what recommendations would have been included had the Commission reported recently, given developments in the intervening 45 years. Many of the changes in education that the Commission championed have been met (see above) although there is more to be done. On occupational segregation and pay equity, two key foci of the Commission, progress has been made.

Where significantly less progress has been made is in the standard employment contract and the precarious nature of much of the employment conditions that women endure. Here, too, and especially in comparison to European countries, family policies that benefit women (as well as children and men) have not been as strong and quite possibly would have been stressed much more had the Commission reported more recently.

The Stalling in Policy Infrastructure

More broadly, as Newman and Waite (2012:217) note, policy language has shifted from equality to choice, opportunity, and fairness. For example, more policy initiatives are now tied to market incomes (e.g., tax credits, employment insurance) and less to basic welfare needs. The consequence of this is a stalling of policy support for gender equity, in part because women earn less than men but also because choice and opportunity typically are more beneficial to those in positions of privilege. Exemplifying this is the Universal Childcare Benefit, the $100.00 that parents receive every month for children. After tax, a single mother earning $30,000 would net $301 annually whereas, because the benefit is taxable for the lower income spouse, a one-earner couple earning $200,000 would net $1,076 (Battle 2006).

The policy rug has also been snapped out from under gender equity in more direct ways. The Court Challenges Program, for example, has been virtually eliminated; where once it supported wide-ranging constitutional challenges related to equality, now it only funds language-rights issues. Severe cuts to the Status of Women Canada and a host of other women's organizations and research bodies have decimated lobby efforts on behalf of equality for women (Brodie 2008; Porter 2012:24-25). The infrastructure of policy design and equality monitoring, integral to the federal government bureaucracy subsequent to the 1970s Royal Commission, has been effectively eliminated (Bird and Rowe 2013). Coupled with the eradication of funding support for community-based social movements related to gender equity, significant forces propelling the gender-equity revolution have been dismantled (Brodie 2008; Knight and Rodgers 2012).

THE STALLED REVOLUTION

Is the gender-equity revolution merely incomplete or unfinished, or has it stalled? Certainly the turn to neoliberal policies documented above has been toxic for the feminist movement, a key agent of earlier change. While the effects of new policy directions have only begun to bite, the evidence we have presented, in figures and in research citations, includes a slowing in female labor force participation, a sag in pay equity, a slowing of domestic labor convergence, and formal political participation for women ranking Canada 61st in the world. We interpret this, and the rest of our evidence, as indicators of stalling. And we stress too that change has been uneven, with some women and some family types benefiting far less than others from greater gender equity (e.g., single parent women, Aboriginal and recent immigrant women, and working class women).

Identifying the exact reasons why the revolution has stalled and been uneven is our next focus. Part of the explanation lies in what England (2006:253-58) identifies as gender's "tenacity" as an organizing principle in the modern world. Highly related to this is men's reluctance to engage in traditional women's domains (e.g., child rearing, nursing). Men are thought to have less to gain from supposedly stooping to engage in feminized behaviors, where their efforts would typically bring less pay, not to mention ridicule and shame from other men and from some women. The benefactors of privilege--men--fail to see themselves as gendered beings.

The sociological literature is replete with cultural explanations for enduring gender difference. Chief among these are evaluations of worth biased in favor of men, plus peoples' staunch adherence to strong cultural definitions of femininity and masculinity. Decades of research demonstrate that performance evaluations and judgments of quality favor men, not only when others evaluate but when many people evaluate themselves (Ridgeway 2011, 2014). Furthermore, many people internalize standards of appropriate male and female behavior and feel accountable to these standards which, in turn, lead them to penalize or stigmatize others who violate the standards (Ridgeway 2011). In other words, these are deep cultural beliefs. For this reason, change is difficult, since cultural belief systems are obdurate despite ongoing changes in economic, educational, political, and domestic realms. Cultural beliefs are powerful independent forces, slow to adapt, and for this reason change in the family might be slower than in other institutional arenas where more public forces (e.g., markets and movements) are more influential.

Cultural change will indeed come, slowly following the altered practices charted above, but the final chapters may be the hardest struggle. Popular advice frequently enjoins young people today to "follow your passions," "realize your true self," and "study what you love." In the context of highly gendered scripts about femininity and masculinity, however, such slogans act to reinforce existing patterns of gender segregation. Gender is a fundamental axis of identity. Self-expression, therefore, tends to replicate traditional gender stereotypes about what constitutes appropriate female or male activity. This, in essence, is the conservative underside of popular culture in the modern world. While new explorations of sexuality are encouraging, and serve to shake up gendered conventions, people in power continue to repress significant gender equity progress. Meanwhile, violence against women, cyber misogyny, and fundamentalist religious revivals continue.

All of this speaks to the salience of gendered norms as powerful organizing forces, but it explains less about policy changes where surely the rise of neoliberal forms of governance are also an important explanatory factor in accounting for the stalled and uneven revolution. Neoliberalism favors the primacy of the individual over the collectivity. It also promotes a selective clawing back of the state with the consequent erosion of welfare state supports (Luxton 2010). These changes have been harder on women than men. The fiscalization of social policy (Brodie and Bakker 2008) is a consequence of neoliberalism, in which the state's role is increasingly defined as making capitalism work as opposed to a broader mandate of optimizing societal outcomes for all. Simultaneously, elite men press to make all areas of life open to profit making, so as to enhance their vested interests of power, prestige, and lifestyle (often to the detriment of women, especially Aboriginal, immigrant, and visible-minority women).

But popular culture plays into the mix as well, complicating easy paths of explanation. The ability to try on new roles and to play with identities is reflected in mainstream media and challenges hegemonic assumptions about sex and gender (see Budgeon 2014). Expressions of sexuality are more diverse while unconventional family forms have gained visibility and are gradually being normalized. Less encouraging, however, is that political alliances have also crumbled, particularly among feminists themselves who were so instrumental to former gains. More choices for some women have contributed to exclusion and fragmentation, both of which undermine the collective activism that was crucial for initiating earlier change. The unevenness we have alluded to, where different subpopulations have experienced less movement toward gender equity, is also apparent within feminism. Not only has the fight for gender equity taken a more individualized direction, but many women have felt silenced by the movement and bereft of its victories (Mohanty 1988; see also Clark Mane 2012).

More positively, the increased earning power of women has been consequential for their ability to gain autonomy. This has made it easier at least for some women to actively choose living alone or to have more power within marriage. In important ways, this reflects back on the idea of the "masculinization of women's roles" and suggests that, while such comparison is useful for charting change, it misrepresents new moments where the patterns of women's and men's lives are diverging.

POLICIES MOVING FORWARD

Throughout the last century, feminist activism has incited major shifts in national policy. Its effects have been accompanied by gender realignments in the home, schools, politics, and the workplace. Still, our current political climate is hostile to further change. Supported by the rhetoric of neoliberalism, many politicians are working to undermine the institutional and interpersonal progress we have illustrated. As such, we cannot take the gender-equity revolution for granted: Future policies should reflect feminist activism by establishing stronger safety nets for both women and those impacted by multiple, intersecting vulnerabilities.

The Protestant work ethic, so valued in the economy, must be more aligned with the ethics of care, so necessary to the moral fiber of strong, resilient families, whatever form a family may take and wherever it is that care of young and old occurs. At the same time, the social reproduction of the work force must be ensured. To advance the revolution further, we must blend caretaking with earning (Gerson 2010). This work has to include development of policies that reflect recognition of the biological differences between the sexes (e.g., moving away from a standard employment contract that is male biased or providing lactating mothers with benefits that are not available to men).

Canada has a strong legacy of national social programs that work to the collective advantage of all Canadians--in health, in pensions (Canada Pension Plan/Quebec Pension Plan and Old Age Security), and in employment insurance (although under attack in our neoliberal era). Except in Quebec, no such program exists for childcare, despite the known advantages of early childhood education and the existence of model programs to learn from (e.g., the Nordic models). Advancing the gender-equity revolution requires high-quality childcare provisions (Baker 2011b; Fraser 1994; Korpi, Ferrarini, and Englunk 2013). And robust universal childcare is itself a three-pronged stimulus package: It fosters child development thereby boosting future labor-force skills; it encourages even more parents to work and pay taxes on their employment earnings; and it provides employment for early childhood educators and the infrastructure surrounding such care programs.

The burgeoning service sector, where over 80 percent of Canadians are now employed, is another feature of the change that has occurred in the past century. The underside of the service sector, the Walmartization and Me Jobbing of the economy, has seen the rise of precarious employment where pay is low, security is fraught, benefits are meager, and protections are limited. A significant accomplishment that would both reignite the gender-equity revolution and address an important part of its unevenness, would be the creation of better labor provisions and the greater enforcement of employment laws. Providing and enforcing rights with remedies would be a strong start, as would reinstating the Court Challenges Program to ensure Charter provisions are respected for all.

Finally the varied voices of women from diverse sectors of society need more power in the governance of society, including in the formal political process, as key decision makers in commerce, and in a reinvigorated, grass-roots feminist movement. More varied and powerful female voices in governance would be an indirect consequence of the policy initiatives noted above, but even more direct support should come from current municipal, provincial, and federal governments where men, and especially women, need opportunities to play prominent roles in promoting gender equity. Women's voices are especially important because they often bring to governance different perspectives and values than are typically articulated by men (see, e.g., Holman 2013; Levi, Li, and Zhang 2014; also Bullough et al. 2012).

CONCLUSION AND DISCUSSION

Over the last century convergence has marked the gendered trajectories of the lives of Canadian women and men. The rights and opportunities, as well as the rewards and privileges, enjoyed by women and men have become much more similar in recent decades. Along four dimensions--economic participation and opportunity, educational attainment, political empowerment, and domestic labor--we provide systematic evidence demonstrating this convergence. We chart as well significant policy provisions that have supported this gender revolution. The progress of this revolutionary change for women and men has recently stalled, across all dimensions, especially as resistance to gender equality has escalated. Finally, the major progress that has indisputably occurred has been uneven exactly as the language of intersectionality reflects. Resistance to further change is incorporated both in gendered institutions where policies and practices continue to favor men and in gendered preferences where individual choices continue to reflect strong cultural stereotypes about gender appropriate behavior (see Pedulla and Thebaud 2015).

Rationalist timelines suggest that "progress" is intrinsic to societal evolution. Consequently, the movement toward gender equality is often presented as both natural and inevitable. Changes in gender roles, however, have been hard won. Spearheaded by the feminist movement, attempts to restructure the gender hierarchy have always been met with fierce resistance. History has repeatedly proven that women's rights are contentious. Suggesting that equality is inevitable depoliticizes gender relations and eclipses the ongoing work that feminist activists do. Indeed, collective action and grassroots organizing have been chief among society's most effective catalysts for change.

The concluding decades of the twentieth century witnessed reversals, or at least setbacks, on many of the broadest inequality dimensions in which progress had previously been made. Across the Western world, income inequality increased, anti-foreigner sentiment rose, and tensions of an ancestral, ethnic, or racial nature escalated. The progress of gender equity, as we have seen, similarly experienced a setback. Overall, in developed western nations, the widening of human empathy and equity has stalled. We have offered some policy recommendations for rekindling the march toward greater gender equity, and it is our view that these recommendations would assist in reinforcing progress on other dimensions of inequality.

One serious objection to our work is that it uses a masculine-defined model of the world as a way of seeing (as was true with the Royal Commission on the Status of Women). For example, by selecting the various measures of gender equity that we use, we privilege a certain set of indicators, indicators that were devised to measure a world in which women had little effective voice. This is a strong, robust argument. Our defense is simply to note that any charting of change in the quiet revolution of gender equity must either invent new measures or else use what is at hand. Within the scope of this paper the invention of new, persuasive measures with historical reach is implausible.

By focusing our attention on outcomes, we have privileged ends over means. This has meant a focus, for example, on how the gender income gap has changed. What we have done much less is to examine the means by which, or the social mechanisms through which, change has occurred. It could be argued that, while the outcomes have indeed narrowed, the ways by which that narrowing has occurred are not the most robust for a more harmonious, co-operative, and meaningful way of life.

The completion of the revolution matters for many reasons. In the language of human capital, our collective productivity is less if we are not investing in the fullest development of all people. Beyond our gross domestic product suffering, our ability to govern ourselves and live cooperatively in a shared commons is also impaired if women have a lesser voice. The march to gender equity is ongoing and, when it ends successfully, is a revolution from which everyone will benefit.

NOTES ON DATA SOURCES

We rely extensively on Statistics Canada data, and especially tables from Cansim (Canadian socioeconomic information management system). With Cansim data, we provide the exact table number from which we draw the data. We also use both the first and second edition of the Historical Statistics of Canada, published by Statistics Canada (Cat. no. 11-516-X). Much of this data can be accessed at: http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/11516-x/index-eng.htm. We also make use of Census data and the National Household Survey for 2011, giving appropriate references when cited. Special tabulations of data from several General Social Surveys and from the education database were provided by Statistics Canada. We flag these when cited. Figure 4, on enrollment patterns in selected fields, contains the most problematic data in our view, because recent enrollment information is highly unreliable (caution is necessary with the CAUT material, for example). However, recent tables on degrees granted in selected fields confirm our enrollment data, although the degree data are only available for the last half-century. We also report a special tabulation, based on General Social Survey data, provided to us by Statistics Canada, on the proportion of women aged 50 and over who gave birth to at least one child (1990-2011). Finally, we use several annual Statistics Canada reports, including Education in Canada and Work Absence Rates, referencing them by name at the appropriate places.

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NEIL GUPPY AND NICOLE LUONGO

University of British Columbia

We gratefully acknowledge the constructive comments of two splendid, anonymous reviewers--the paper is much better as a result. We also thank the editor, Rima Wilkes, and Mukesh Eswaran for helpful advice.

Neil Guppy, Department of Sociology, The University of British Columbia, 6303 NW Marine Drive, Vancouver, BC, Canada V6T 1Z1. E-mail: neil.guppy@ubc.ca