Women least represented among designated groups
In taking a look at the impact of the Employment Equity Act and the audit program between 1992 and 2008, employment equity improved in the public sector and federally regulated private sector, according to the Canadian Human Rights Commission (CHRC).
The gap between representation and availability among the designated group members — women, Aboriginal Peoples, people with disabilities and members of a visible minority — was reduced from 8.6 percentage points to 4.2 points.
“Except for the women’s group, all the designated groups are now better represented in the labour market than they were in 1992,” said the report.
However, the status of employment equity is different between the sectors. While visible minorities were fully represented in the private sector in 2008, they remained under-represented in the public sector. And the three other groups were under-represented in the private sector but fully represented in the public service.
“There’s a lot of improvement that happened in the representation but there’s still improvement to be made because the availability still increased,” said Marie-Claude Girard, director of the employment equity compliance division at the CHRC. “It’s a moving target.”
Employment equity legislation has been effective but it hasn’t resolved all the outstanding issues, said Patty Ducharme, national executive director at the Public Service Alliance of Canada.
“I wouldn’t want people to think that we’ve resolved the situation, we can just dump this piece of legislation and the right thing will continue to happen because I don’t think that’s the case. I think people are responding to their obligations.
“The employment equity legislation is pretty toothless, there’s not really any recourse to force the employer’s hand,” said Ducharme.
The report doesn’t touch on the auditing program, she said, and those results would be really interesting since fewer audits are being conducted. There is also greater use of voluntary compliance, she said.
“Allowing the employers to, in their own little bubble, make determinations about where they’re at without any concerns about ever being audited, there will be people who will lie or misrepresent their statistics and won’t do the work that needs to be done.”
Women fare poorly
The numbers were least encouraging for women, according to the CHRC. Over the years, their representation has increased considerably in the public sector but decreased in the private sector.
In the public sector, representation of women went from 46.1 per cent in 1992 to 55.4 per cent in 2008 but in the private sector, it fell from 44.9 per cent to 42.6 per cent.
Women have been highly represented in the banking industry but that declined from 76.3 per cent to 67 per cent, largely because clerical positions were eliminated, said the report.
“Women in the banking industry are better spread (out) into all the appropriate categories, instead of being only in the operational sector so, within that sector, there is improvement for women,” said Girard.
However, in the banking sector, the challenge is getting women from middle management into senior management, said Keith Jeffers, founder of Employment Matters in Oakville, Ont., a provider of employment equity consulting.
Many people don’t see women as disadvantaged anymore because of the benefits of affirmative action.
“Women tend to be well-represented in the professionals category,” he said.
Aboriginals gain ground
Aboriginal Peoples saw their representation increase steadily through the years, from 1.3 per cent to 2.5 per cent, though the measurement of this group in the census has changed over the years, largely because of self-identification.
Representation doubled in both the public and private sectors, from two per cent to 4.1 per cent and from one per cent to 1.9 per cent, respectively.
However, a government survey on public service employment found Aboriginal Peoples are leaving employment in the public sector at almost as high a level as representation, said Ducharme, and they’re very highly represented in entry-level jobs, not in more senior positions or management.
“It’s good to see that people are getting in but barriers have to be removed as well so the ones that stay in, that their careers thrive and advance,” she said.
People with disabilities get boost in public sector
While the representation of people with disabilities among federally regulated employers grew from 2.7 per cent in 1992 to 3.4 per cent in 2008, again, the measurement has changed. Representation saw substantial growth in the public sector, from 3.1 per cent in 1992 to 5.6 per cent in 2008, but was steady in the private sector, from 2.5 per cent to 2.7 per cent.
“A decline in requirements for workforce accommodations and in the perception of disadvantage also contributed to the decrease in the representation gap,” said the report.
Since it is based on self-identification, there might be more visible people at work who don’t consider themselves disabled because the workplace has acknowledged their need, said Girard.
“It’s easier for them to integrate into the workplace.”
When looking at the representation data, does that measure people who report a disability while in the workforce or are they looking at the hiring pattern, because those are two different perspectives, said Jeffers. An aging workforce will see an increase in disabilities, he said, though many people still deny their condition.
Growth for visible minorities
Members of visible minorities saw substantial growth in their population, with availability increasing from 9.1 per cent to 15.3 per cent.
Representation grew by 7.1 percentage points in the public sector — from 3.8 per cent to 10.9 per cent — and 8.7 percentage points in the private sector — from 7.9 per cent to 16.6 per cent.
However, representation in the public sector has continued to be lower than the private sector. But most public sector employers are based in Ottawa-Gatineau, which has a smaller visible minority population, said the CHRC report. The Canadian citizenship requirement for public servants may also have an impact.
But the population statistics in some cities are based on old census data, said Ducharme.
“Even though those numbers show that they’ve closed the gap in the private sector, I’m guessing if we actually had up-to-date census data, that there would even be work in the private sector to do.”
It raises the question of racism in the workplace and, secondly, the issue of recognizing foreign credentials and equivalencies, said Jeffers.
“We have to have a program or effort to ensure employment is accessible and, more important, that there is an attempt by organizations to access talent that is outside of the traditional.”
