Highlights from the Women in Canada report include:

• women accounted for 47% of the employed work force in 2004, up from 37% in 1976.
  
  
• women remain very much a minority among professionals employed in the natural sciences, engineering and mathematics.
  
  
• dramatic increases in the employment levels of women with very young children. By 2004, 65% of all women with children under the age of three were employed, more than double the proportion in 1976. Similarly, 70% of women whose youngest child was aged three to five worked for pay in 2004, up from 37% in 1976.
  
  
• the share of female lone parents with jobs has risen dramatically over the last three decades.
  
  
• women are much more likely than their male counterparts to work part time.
  
  
• majority of employed women continue to work in occupations in which women have traditionally been concentrated. In 2004, two-thirds of all employed women were working in teaching, nursing and related health occupations, clerical or other administrative positions, and sales and service occupations.
  
  
• there has been virtually no change in the proportion of women employed in these traditionally female-dominated occupations over the past decade.
  
  
• women's earnings still substantially lower... In 2003, women working on a full-time, full-year basis had average earnings of $36,500, or 71% what their male counterparts made.
  
  
• the gap between the earnings of women and men has not changed substantially in the past decade.
  
  
• women make up a disproportionate share of the population in Canada with low incomes as measured by Statistics Canada's low income cut-off (LICO) on an after-tax basis. Unattached women are particularly likely to have low incomes.
  
  
• seniors are the least likely unattached women to have low incomes... The incidence of low income among unattached senior women has dropped sharply since the early 1980s.
  
  
• families headed by female lone parents also have relatively high rates of low income. ... lone-parent families headed by women continue to be home to a disproportionate share of all children living in a low-income situation.
  
  
• one in seven women is a visible minority ... more than two million women, or 14% of the total female population, are members of a visible minority. They are centered largely in Toronto and Vancouver.
  
  
• more than one-quarter (26%) of women who reported that they were in a visible minority were Chinese, while 22% were South Asian and 17% were Black, according to the 2001 Census.
  
  
• three out of every four women who were members of a visible minority lived in either Ontario or British Columbia. ... women in a visible minority made up 22% of the overall female population of British Columbia, and 19% in Ontario.
  
  
• the female visible minority population is relatively well educated. ... in 2001, 21% of visible minority woman aged 15 or older had a university degree, compared with 14% of other women.
  
  
• while visible minority women are better educated on average than other Canadian women, they are somewhat less likely to be employed. In addition, visible minority women generally earn less at their jobs than do other women.

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