Our lives, they've been a-changin'

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With more women than men in Canada's paid workforce, the traditional roles the genders play are undergoing a radical transformation. (NICK DIDLICK / VANCOUVER SUN)

One day soon, a woman will get hired as a cashier at a Walmart somewhere in the United States.

And the balance will tip, perhaps forever.

In the next few months, women will make up the majority of the American workforce and that cashier may well be the first one to cross the 50 per cent threshold.

Canada has already reached the tipping point, perhaps as long as four years ago.

In 2006, women accounted for 58 per cent of the paid workforce, up from 42 per cent in 1976. Statistics Canada calls it "one of the most significant social trends in Canada in the past quarter century," and it's hard to argue.

StatsCan also found -- you can read it all in the 2005-2006 report, Women in Canada: A Gender-based Statistical Report -- that women have increased their representation in several professional fields and in managerial positions.

Time for women to pop the champagne corks, no?

Well, maybe.

As with other major social changes -- and this one is huge -- the implications can reach farther than first imagined.

For one thing, what The Economist magazine recently called "the rich world's quiet revolution" may actually be less a female surge than a case of men falling back.

Recessions tend to hit traditionally male industries -- trades, manufacturing, finance -- hardest. More than 80 per cent of jobs lost in Canada since October 2008 were held by men, according to StatsCan, prompting some to dub the current economic downturn a "man-cession."

Much of the government's recovery focus is on "shovel-ready infrastructure," says Susan Prentice, associate professor of sociology at the University of Manitoba. "There's been much less attention paid to what you might call the social infrastructure -- the creation of child-care spaces, for instance. In fact, we've got a federal government going in exactly the opposite direction.

"It may be a 'man-cession,' but it's also man spending."

For another thing, the so-called female invasion of the workplace is bound to have a big impact on the domestic front. A truer measure of how similar men's and women's life paths are becoming is to look at how they're sharing their work and family responsibilities.

"Although many more women haven taken on the earning side of the equation, men have been significantly slower to take on the care-giving side," says Prentice, who specializes in family, gender and public policy. If the new norm becomes a household where she has two jobs and he has none, let's leave the cork in the bubbly.

Of course, it doesn't have to be that way. Aboriginal lawyer Joan Jack, who has six children (ages eight to 20), says her own ascent through the glass ceiling was a team effort involving her husband and her mother.

"I actually got pregnant during my second year of law school, and everyone thought I was going to quit," says Jack, 49, who runs her own legal practice, specializing in aboriginal family and corporate law and currently puts in around 60 hours a week.

Jack says she and her husband, a First Nations politician and builder, made a conscious decision that if anyone stayed home it would be him because of her higher earning capacity.

Work-life balance is all about choices and tradeoffs, as Corrine Scott, the Winnipeg Police Service's first female superintendent, can attest. After joining the force in 1981 -- when there were no women in supervisory roles -- she spent years pulling long and unpredictable shifts on the vice squad. (Women accounted for 0.2 per cent of senior officers in 1986 compared with 8.3 per cent in 2009.)

"As I progressed through the ranks, I eventually got to a Monday-to-Friday job, but when my daughter (now 13) came along, I consciously made the decision not to work somewhere where the hours would be too unpredictable," says Scott, 51, who is married to a fellow police officer.

"Motherhood didn't interfere with my career because I had strong family support -- my mom and dad were backup caregivers -- but I made some key decisions along the way."

No doubt men will face their own challenges in navigating the new social landscape.

Jack says her husband has been criticized for staying at home and teased about being "whipped." And according to early research by Rachael Pettigrew, a PhD candidate in the U of M's department of family and social sciences, the workplace itself may be making it harder for men to step up to the plate at home.

Pettigrew, who is doing her thesis on the use of parental leave by male employees and attitudes within organizational culture, has found that new fathers may be reluctant to use the benefits -- up to 37 weeks under the Employment Insurance Act -- because of the stigma in the workplace.

"On average, men take a couple of weeks, if they do at all, but most likely they're going to take vacation time, due to the impression it leaves at work," says Pettigrew, 35, who just returned from her own year-long maternity leave. "Often times, managers see men who take the time off as prioritizing family over work, so it becomes a commitment issue."

Canada, she says, should follow the lead of European countries with progressive public policies. Sweden, for example, has a daddy month -- a 30-day paid leave that cannot be transferred between parents -- the hope being that if fathers do a lot of caregiving and bonding when their children are very young, it will set a long-term pattern for the family.

"Policies have to change, but attitudes have to change as well," says Pettigrew.

And who knows? What may also change is our very perception of what it means to be a man or a woman.

carolin.vesely@freepress.mb.ca

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition January 19, 2010 C1