Photograph by Yvonne Berg
The past few years have been difficult for Brian and Karen Rae. After working at K Tool & Die for more than a decade, Brian, 62, was laid off from the Oakville, Ont., plant, which made parts for the auto industry, in December 2008. At the time, Brian, who had been a toolmaker for 38 years, was earning about $58,000—a decent salary, he says, but not enough to live comfortably. “You can’t make it on one family income anymore.” As such, Karen has long worked full-time at Zellers, where she earns less than $20,000 a year assisting customers in the men’s department. The importance of her job has been “brought to the forefront” since he lost his, says Brian, along with the fact that surviving on it alone is impossible. While he completes a government-funded course in home renovation (he gave up on toolmaking after distributing 100 resumés to no avail), they’ve had to dip into their RRSPs. “It’s been a bit of a struggle to keep up with everything,” he says.
As Ottawa celebrates the country’s official return to economic growth, the Raes are not the only ones for whom recovery remains an abstract notion. Dubbed the “man-cession” or “he-session” for the way in which it snuffed out male-dominated manufacturing jobs, the downturn has dramatically altered the dynamic of many working class families. According to the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, men suffered 76 per cent of the overall job losses; Statistics Canada numbers show that in 2009, male employment levels dipped by a total of 249,000 over the previous year, compared to a decline of 28,000 for women.
The reality today is that a middle class existence, more often than not, means a two-income family, with more women assuming the role of primary breadwinner than ever before. But a stubborn fact, buried under decades of gender equality and diversity training, has resurfaced: despite comprising more than half the workforce and outpacing the educational achievements of men, women still make less. What’s happened since the recession, says Barb Byers, executive vice-president of the Canadian Labour Congress, “is the men have looked [at what their wives are earning] and said, ‘Wait a minute, these are really crappy jobs. You can’t feed a family on this.’ ” It’s a reality that, when combined with the downturn and the shrinking middle class, is wreaking havoc on family finances.
In the ’60s and ’70s, when women first entered the workforce in droves, there was a sense of liberation. They became lawyers, doctors, factory workers and businesswomen. “Women now intellectually believe and expect to do anything they want,” says Alison Konrad, a professor of organizational behaviour at the Richard Ivey School of Business. But increasingly, they are also prodded on by necessity—in 1980, 53 per cent of couples were dual earners; by 2007, the proportion had increased to 65 per cent, according to Clarence Lochhead, executive director of the Vanier Institute of the Family. “The majority of people earning the average family income are doing so on the basis of two earners,” says Lochhead. “That’s simply the reality.”
This can be explained, in part, by the declining fortunes of men. While average earnings are on the rise, median earnings (the level at which there is an equal number of workers above and below) are slowly sinking. According to Lochhead, from 1980 to 2007 the proportion of men earning between $20,000 and $60,000—what he describes as the “broad middle”—dropped from 50 to 42 per cent. “You’ve got some men who are out there, and they’re doing quite well,” he says, “but then you’ve got this other stream, showing up in greater proportion at the lower end of the income-earnings distribution.”
On top of this, men who do bring home big bucks are increasingly pairing up with women who do the same. And as young adults wait longer to get married, they’re more likely to share the same education—and income levels—as their spouses, a phenomenon known as “assortative mating.” “It used to be that college-educated men would marry women with a high school education,” says Nicole Fortin, a labour economist at the University of British Columbia. “Nowadays, this is less the case.” Instead, high earners tend to be part of “power couples,” which, she says, “relates to the relative increase in polarization” of the rich and poor.
But no matter where a household sits on the economic spectrum, if there are two income earners of opposite sex, chances are the woman is still making less. Though the size of the average gender wage gap depends on the methodology behind the calculations—recent estimates put it anywhere from 29 per cent (according to a recent Canadian Labour Congress report) to seven per cent—none dispute that it exists.
To be sure, women are making strides: their earnings are increasing faster than men’s, and more women are assuming the role of their family’s primary earner. But the fact that disparity persists, according to Sue Calhoun, president of the Canadian Federation of Business & Professional Women’s Clubs, points, in large part, to our failure to address an old problem—the lack of affordable child care. “For women in the workforce, it’s kind of like a bottom line,” she says, adding that the federal government’s annual child-care subsidy of $1,200 is not nearly enough. To care for their kids, she says, women are forced to cut back on their hours and take time out from the workforce, pulling down their income and potential for job advancement.
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