Women and Canada's Gross Domestic Product: A Growing Contribution

On International Women's Day, March 8, let's take a few minutes to recognize and celebrate the global social, economic, cultural and political achievements of women and girls.

From 2008 to 2018, the contribution of women to Canada’s gross domestic product (GDP) rose 2.8 percentage points to 28.5%, while the contribution of men edged up 0.5 percentage points to 49.2%. Just under one-quarter of Canada’s GDP (attributable to the operating surplus of entities, such as governments or large publicly traded corporations) cannot be allocated, as it is impossible to determine the gender of the contributor.

Health care, social assistance and educational services sectors

In 2018, women contributed just under three-fifths to Canada’s GDP in health care and social assistance and educational services sectors and over one-third to the GDP in the public and arts, entertainment and recreation sectors.

Women’s contribution to GDP was also highest in public sector industries and lowest in goods-producing industries. In 2018, 4 in 10 women in the labour force worked in public administration, educational services or the health care and social assistance sectors.

Women and unpaid work at home

GDP is a measure of production that excludes most household services, and women produce more of these services than men do. For example, women spent 3.9 hours per day on unpaid work on average in 2015 compared with 2.4 hours for men.

As a result, the gender-based estimates of GDP underestimate the contribution of women to total production in Canada because they do not include the value of non-marketed services that households produce for themselves.

Housework refers to a wide range of chores geared toward caring for household members, their home and the property on which it sits, and their vehicles.  It is commonly known that women typically spend more time on housework than men. Indeed, women in Canada spent an average of 2.8 hours per day on housework as a primary activity in 2015—54 minutes more than men (1.9 hours per day). That translates to women spending an average of 6.3 hours more than men on housework each week.

Like housework, child-care tasks are gendered: women generally spend more time than men on routine tasks related to the physical care of children. In 2010, 76.1% of women in Canada aged 25 to 54, whose youngest child in the household was under the age of 16, performed routine child-care tasks on a given day, compared with 56.7% of men (a difference of 19.4 percentage points).

Furthermore, these women spent nearly one hour more per day on routine child-care tasks than their male counterparts (2.3 hours per day versus 1.4 hours per day, a difference of 54 minutes). On the other hand, women were less likely than men to participate in outdoor maintenance (6.1% versus 12.8%) and repair, painting, and renovation (1.3% versus 3.3%).

Want to know more? Read the full study, “Improving the measurement of the contribution of women to the economy: Estimates of gross domestic product by gender” and the accompanying infographic “Contributions to gross domestic product by gender, 2008 to 2018.”