Canada and IMF seek to overcome Covid setbacks faced by women

Canadian government and IMF are elevating the role of women economists and carrying out policies to spur economic recovery

Canada’s Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance Chrystia Freeland touted efforts to bolster the role of women in crafting economic policy. Reuters

Women have borne the brunt of the damage wrought by the Covid-19 pandemic, but both Canada and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) are seeking to rectify that by elevating the role of women in crafting economic policy.

IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva and Canada’s Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance Chrystia Freeland on Friday touted their efforts to bolster the role of women economists in crafting economic policy as they aim to shore up the global and Canadian economies following the pandemic.

While hosting Ms Freeland in an IMF video series called The Exchange, Ms Georgieva announced the IMF would appoint economist Ratna Sahay to a new position as senior adviser for gender "to strengthen our work on gender equality as we support our members to recover from the crisis".

Ms Freeland highlighted the role of a women-only task force in crafting the Canadian budget and its role in helping spur investments intended to bolster women's role in the labour force.

“There has been a troubling sign that the recession is a 'she-cession', that women’s jobs are more severely affected than those of men,” Ms Georgieva said.

“New research from the Fund finds that the more accurate term may be 'mom-cession', that women with young children, mothers – particularly less-educated ones – were the most adversely affected during the crisis.”

She noted that while women's jobs were coming back, it is at a slower pace than any other group.

Ms Freeland said one of Canada’s starting points in its budget priorities was focusing on women – particularly low-wage working mothers.

"We need to lift this group up in order to restart our whole economy.”

“In our budget, we are putting a big emphasis on early learning and childcare,” Ms Freeland said. “We are committing $30 million – and for Canada, that’s a lot of money – over five years and $9m a year ongoing built into the fiscal framework to build a universal, affordable system of early learning and childcare across Canada.”

“Our ambition is that five years from now, every Canadian will be able to have access to high-quality early learning and childcare for an average of $10 per day.”

Ms Freeland called the plan “a tremendous driver of long-term economic growth for Canada” and credited the all-women working group that she co-chaired for the programme.

“The single most important thing that that group has done for me … is helped me to have the courage of my convictions,” Ms Freeland said. “This policy is a feminist policy, it’s a social policy, but it is also an economic policy.”

“It is actually going to drive jobs and growth and ... there is no contradiction there.”

Ms Freeland said the early learning and childcare policy is an infrastructure investment, noting that many economists are biased against investing in programmes that primarily benefit women.

“There can still be a bias to kind of, say, real infrastructure investment that drives real jobs and growth – that has to be physical infrastructure, it has to be done by men wearing hard hats and gloves, building a bridge,” Ms Freeland said.

“I would encourage everyone, women as well as men who are policymakers, to try to set up some structures that help you push against that bias, because it can be hard to do it by yourself.”