Thank you very much for the opportunity to speak with you today about this important topic.

I appeared before this committee on January 30, and then I spoke about the veteran population and their employment experience in general. Most of my talk was on studies related to life after service. These are surveys with an income-record linkage, which are conducted every three years by Statistics Canada.

Today I'll be using that same data to talk about the employment experience particularly of female veterans.

Female veterans in Canada have been found to experience relatively large reductions in post-release income, and much of this is due to a decline in their employment earnings. That is as a result, in part, of their lower labour force participation and higher rates of part-time work compared to male veterans. In the year after release, 39% of women reported that their main activity was working, compared to 59% of men.

Women are more likely to attend school, be providing care to others and report being on disability as their main activities. This explains a lot of their lower rates of labour force participation.

Females are also twice as likely as male veterans to work part time post release. The largest employer for both female and male veterans is the public service. However, women are more likely to work in health care, while men are more likely to work in construction and manufacturing.

As I mentioned earlier, women veterans earn less than men. This is true across industries, except for mining and agriculture. Though occupation may also play a role in women's lower earnings, we do not know what occupations veterans are working in post release.

Paradoxically, although female veterans are more likely to be in a comparable civilian occupation, such as administrative work, at release than their male veteran counterparts, they are less likely to agree that the knowledge and skills used in their civilian jobs are the same as those used during their military service. However, in terms of satisfaction with employment, women and men have been found to be similar.

What does all this mean? For women, work disability is more of an issue than for men. Fortunately, there are evidence-based approaches to the prevention of work disability, such as work accommodations, case management and multidisciplinary health care. However, this necessitates that case managers, both at VAC and CAF, work closely with employers. From what I understand, that is not often the case.

Women who have caregiving responsibilities also require accommodations. It appears that many women veterans may be taking part-time work, or not working at all, to allow time to care for others. This puts them in a more precarious situation in terms of low income.

Qualitative research could help us understand the unique barriers to the labour market that women experience. We also need more quantitative research that includes larger samples of female veterans. Current data limits our detection of similarities and differences between male and female veterans, since female veterans make up only around 13% of the population. It's hard to see what differences there are between them, given those small numbers.

Also, on the record linkage of tax data to survey data—which currently exists.... The record linkages between those two datasets have not been done. This could help us to understand the lower labour force participation rates among women, and their lower earnings as well.

That concludes my preamble. I welcome your questions.