ON THE BASIS OF SEX

By SHAGORIKA EASWAR, with files from NEWS CANADA

What, exactly, should gender equity look like? In an ideal scenario, it would mean not keeping anyone down on the basis of sex. Equally, it would ensure that no one occupies a position only because they fit a legislated profile.

Female. Person of colour. Immigrant.

And I say that as someone who ticks all those boxes. Because doing so not only diminishes the organization, it also diminishes the person, shifting the attention from what she brings to the table.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg was the second woman to serve on the US Supreme Court. But before she got there, she was unable to find a position with a law firm because none of the firms wanted to hire a woman – in spite of graduating at the top of her class.

She became a professor at Rutgers Law School, teaching Sex Discrimination and the Law. She made history by fighting to claim her rightful position in the field of law and won landmark cases that challenge many laws that assume that men will work to provide for the family, and women will stay home and take care of the husband and children. She believed that if she could set a precedent ruling that a man was unfairly discriminated against on the basis of sex, that precedent could be cited in cases challenging laws that discriminate against women.

On the Basis of Sex is a 2018 movie based on her life.

But is life dramatically different for women because some laws have been repealed and newer ones enacted?

Not really, because though laws provide recourse and protection, they don’t trickle down enough to change mindsets.

Take cricket. Virat Kohli is (okay, was) feted while many of us struggle to name the top female cricketers. How many of us can say they had heard of Jhulan Goswami before Anushka Sharma played her in Chakda Xpress?

Tim Hortons hockey cards began featuring women players for the first time only in January 2022.

Women are chastised for wearing revealing clothes while out running while men can go bare-chested.

Vilified for doing their jobs – a clear case in point being the cancellation of a book club event with lawyer Marie Henein by TDSB late last year. Would there have been such a reaction if a man had represented Jian Ghomeshi?

Does anyone recall the names of the lawyers who represented Paul Bernardo or Karla Homolka?

Women are routinely asked how they “manage” the work-life balance, men are rarely subjected to such questions.

With her constituency and family in Oakville, and work taking her to Ottawa frequently, Canada’s Defence Minister Anita Anand isn’t spared.

“Thousands of women face this question every day, I am one of them,” she’d said to me in July 2020.

There’s the “Pink Tax”. The almost pretty-monicker hides an ugly truth – gender-based price discrimination.

In an article in the Toronto Star dated September 17, 2021, Amir Barnea described it as products for women and girls being priced higher than the equivalent products for men and boys.

So women not only get paid less, they are charged more?

A task force was set up in 2021 to review employment equity. “Moving forward with the implementation of the Pay Equity Act will help ensure that women receive equal pay for work of equal value in federally regulated workplaces,” I read. And did a double take.

We’re still talking about employment equity? For basically half our population? And in federally regulated workplaces?

Then there’s the gender gap in healthcare.

Women are impacted by many diseases in ways that are significantly different from the way men are, and they respond differently to medication. And yet, the inclusion of women in clinical trials has only been mandated since 1993.

Thus women today are living with therapies that were not necessarily tested on women. Up to 75 per cent of drug reactions occur in women. This is directly related to the fact that there was little information available on how their biological differences may change reactions to specific drug therapies.

Shocking as this is, the gender gap in the research process has been a quiet secret for years.

Studies have shown that women’s health research is funded less often than men’s, for shorter terms and for lower funding amounts, with less than eight per cent of national funding supporting women’s health research.

Less than one per cent of salary awards in Canada go towards women’s health research. Most women’s health researchers are women – and there are fewer women researchers overall.

Only 28 per cent of those who hold prestigious Canada Research Chairs, which come with $500,000 to $1.4 million dollars in research funding, are women. This leads to women’s symptoms being misdiagnosed because the data around women’s unique physiology simply doesn’t exist.

A survey of Canadian adults by Women’s Health Collective Canada highlights just how much we don’t know about over half of our population’s health.

For example, 89 per cent of respondents don’t know that women are more likely than men to experience an adverse reaction to prescription medications, and only 20 per cent know that heart disease kills more women than men each year. Meanwhile, 83 per cent don’t know that about a third of women suffer from periods severe enough to interfere with daily activities.

Studies led by Professor Esme Fuller-Thomson, Director of the Institute for Life Course & Aging at the University of Toronto, report that 1 in 4 women with ADHD have attempted suicide in their lifetime and are 69 per cent more likely to have had a substance abuse disorder. They have triple the prevalence of insomnia, chronic pain, suicidal ideation, childhood sexual abuse and generalized anxiety disorder and double the rate of substance use, smoking, depressive disorder, severe poverty, and childhood physical abuse compared to women without ADHD. 

Organizations such as Women’s Health Collective Canada are looking to right the course. 

Here’s looking ahead to the day when young women can say they do not face the same barriers on the basis of sex as yet another International Women’s Day rolls around.

 • International Women’s Day is on March 8.