Season 1
Ep1: International Equal Pay Day: A Global Call to Action
Have you ever considered how your favourite TV show influences the way you see gender roles?
Kadie Philp sits down with Dr. Andrea Braithwaite, a senior teaching professor at Ontario Tech University, to explore how television has shaped—and been shaped by—women’s roles in society.
Ep2: Technology and Gender-Based Inequality
It’s not intuitively obvious that the distinction between gender roles and gender discrimination would arise or change as a result of technology, but Dr. Debora Spar makes a compelling case for this in her recent book Work, Mate, Marry, Love: How Machines Shape our Human Destiny. Starting with the invention of the plow she argues “patriarchy has its origins in the Neolithic Revolution” and brings her readers through a journey of the interplay between technological change and broader social structures including gender discrimination. In this conversation Dr. Spar gives insight on the impacts of technology on gender roles, gender constructs, the value of “women’s work”, and how changing social responses to technology may actually help us evolve past “constructed norms” and into equality.
Ep3: Myth-Busting and the Gender Wage Gap
Ask men and women why the gender wage gap exists, and you will get a variety of answers, most of them based on common “myths” about women, work, and compensation. In this episode, we deconstruct some of these myths with the help of subject matter experts.
Ep4: Women, Work, and Inequity and Women of the Pandemic
The story of the pandemic was different for women. Author and Journalist Lauren McKeon argues that, in many ways, the story of the pandemic is the story of women. In her most recent book, Women of the Pandemic, she documents how “women have never before played such a vital, essential role in a global crisis,” and that “they’ve also been the ones who suffered the most”. Lauren’s research covers gender inequalities, gender and power, gender and inclusion, as well as racialized aspects of both gender and power for working women. In this conversation Lauren shares what her research has uncovered about women, work and inequity.
Ep5: Women of Colour in the Workplace
Lean In Canada has published a report looking at racialized women at work in Ontario. Commissioner Ward speaks with Lean In Canada to learn more about what they discovered.
Ep6: International Perspectives
How would we consider women’s worth if women had been considered “persons” in Canada before 1927? Together with Federal Pay Equity Commissioner Jensen, Commissioner Philp explores this question while looking at Pay Equity Legislation provincially and federally as well as new AI and-data driven software tools that analyze and help close the gender pay gaps.