Attack of the 5-foot woman

The price of harassment

An East Coast woman is suing the Halifax Bank of Scotland for sexual, racial and religious harassment.

When Mona Awad worked as a corporate banking manager in the branch in Nottingham “one boss taunted her by saying a colleague had been watching her on holiday wearing a bikini, it is alleged.”

She says he also told her he did not want to work with Asians and mocked her for fasting during Ramadan.

Then when she transferred to another branch in Derby, her new boss started to harass her.

‘He asked me in front of my colleagues in a meeting whether I was “s****ing” an employee of our customer. I was devastated.’

He once lifted up her pant leg in front of staff to show them her leg. 

Ms. Awad is suing the bank and her two former managers. Neither man works with the company anymore, but after she encountered such a hostile work environment in two branches it does raise questions about how the bank failed to protect workers from discrimination.

She’s suing for £16.7 million ($29 million in Canadian dollars) in compensation for loss of earnings, injury to feelings, aggravated damages and punitive damages.

If she gets that much, it could be one of the highest amounts awarded for sex discrimination in Great Britain.

I kind of hope she gets it. Companies can be really bad at handling harassment, reacting months after the fact or simply transferring the complainant or putting her on sick leave. 

Nothing will inspire companies to pro-actively tackle discrimination in the workplace like the potential to lose almost $30 million.

Military Women

Excuse the late post, but yesterday was incredibly busy. Yesterday was also Remembrance Day.

Women have been involved in Canada’s military for more than 100 years.

The largest number of women served during the World War II and many performed non-traditional duties.

When the Navy, Army, and Air Force again let women enlist in the early 1950s, they were restricted to medicine, communication, logistics, and administration.

The Royal Commission on the Status of Women began pushing for greater military opportunities for women and in 1971 the Canadian Forces lifted the ceiling of 1,500, and gradually expanded women’s roles into the non-traditional areas (vehicle drivers and mechanics, aircraft mechanics, air-traffic controllers, military police, and firefighters)

In 1989 a Canadian Human Rights Tribunal ordered the Canadian Forces to fully integrate women into all occupations by 1999, including combat roles. 

Today Canadian women can enlist in all military jobs, except for submarine duty (the Oberon Class submarines that the CF currently uses cannot accommodate a mixed-gender crew) and Roman Catholic chaplaincy.

About 7,100 women are in the Canadian forces today, 10.6 per cent of the regular force. In the reserves there are 15,544 women representing about 18 per cent of the reserves.

In 2003 Major Anne Reiffenstein became the first woman to command a combat arms sub-unit.

In May 2006, Capt. Nichola Goddard was the first Canadian female soldier to die in combat since World War II.

Remembrance Day is a wonderful reminder to honour our fallen soldiers. Let’s hope people remember more than once a year to be thankful for those women and men who have served their country and the women who fought for the opportunity to fight for us.

Clothes make the woman

Why is it we never seem to get tired of talking about female politicians’ clothing?

There are a number of things people can attack Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin on.

While Mayor, she charged sexual assault victims for the cost of processing their rape kits.

She wants to ban all abortion, even in cases of rape, incest or when the mother’s health is at risk.

An employee quit over her horrible record of not hiring Alaskan Natives.

She keeps using her five kids as political props.

I really could go on all day.

Now Palin is drawing fire for spending $150,000 of the Republican party’s money on clothes for the campaign.

Let’s draw the line here.

While her clothing spending is incredibly high, it’s really unfair to talk about it because we have no point for comparison.

I haven’t seen a single article on what the men in the American election race are spending on their suits. For all we know Democrat VP candidate Joe Biden could be spending twice as much.

It’s infuriating that in this day and age, women politician are still more critically viewed for what they look like and what they wear than what they believe or how they do the job. 

The point the media was likely trying to make is that Palin would be fiscally irresponsible with government money, but there are much better ways to prove it.

Take the fact that she spent $50,000 in tax payer’s money to redecorate her office... twice, while she was Mayor.

May throws well... for a girl

When you have to fight like mad to get in the game, you better come ready to play ball.

And that’s exactly what Green Party leader Elizabeth May did last night in the first of the televised national debates.

It was May’s first national debate and it was in French, which she is still learning, and she did incredibly well.

She managed to get by with her basic French and got in more than a few scripted jabs at Harper’s environmental policy.

It’s rumored she spoke nothing but French for days leading up to last night to prepare.

Don’t let the tree-hugging fool you, May is a politician. Of course, she was going to go into the debates prepared.    

I don’t know why people seem surprised. Maybe they were expecting her to get up there, try to say two words in French and break down crying?       

The “didn’t she do well considering?” reaction to May’s debate performance could be seen as understanding but the cynic in me sees it as condescending. It’s the political version of throwing well... for a girl.

But, really we should be grateful. No one is talking about her cleavage, her outfit, or any knocked-up teenage children.

She works hard for the money

I’m a little late to finding out that Ontario women are working for free for the rest of the year. And now that I know, it’s so infuriating, I almost wish I didn’t.               

Sept. 17 is 71 per cent of the way through the year, and for women, it marks “Now You’re Working for Free Day”.

Ontario women earn on average 71 cents for every dollar men earn.

That means if we were paid what men are paid for similar work, we would not get paid again from Sept. 17 until Jan. 1 to account for the 29 per cent gender pay gap. 

That gap means women are denied their fair pay from now until the end of the year while men get their full pay.

The Ontario Public Service Employees Union (OPSEU) put out an incredibly well-researched release on “Now You’re Working for Free Day”.

“Ontario’s pay gap hits women, regardless of where they work, the size of their workplace, or if their work is full-time or part-time, contract or temporary.

But some women suffer more than others. Racial minority women earn 36% less than men and Aboriginal women earn 54% less. Women with disabilities earn much less than women and men without disabilities.

While women’s increasing levels of education have helped, a gap remains regardless of education. Female high school graduates earn 27% less than male graduates. Female university graduates earn 16% less than male graduates.

The lowest gap has long been found among women just starting work, but the gap widens as women age. Married women face the widest pay gap at 33%, partly because they bear an unequal share of care responsibilities.

The gap continues into retirement as a lifetime of unequal pay and benefits results in retired women receiving a median income just half that of retired men.”

Paying women less than men for similar work is illegal. Twenty years ago, Ontario introduced the Pay Equity Act. The Act required employers to evaluate, without bias, jobs done mainly by women and men and to pay equal wages and benefits for comparable worth. It helped reduce the pay gap from 38 per cent in 1988 to 29 per cent now.

But 29 per cent is still way too big a difference, especially when it’s looked at as 3.5 months of free work from half the population.   

Women and children are the majority of Ontario’s poor. When a woman’s work is undervalued it means her children will suffer too.    

The union is asking for the province’s Poverty Reduction Strategy to include strong pay equity enforcement.

The Equal Pay Coalition, representing over 1 million Ontarians, is highlighting the issue with their 20th Anniversary Campaign. Thousands of working women are signing postcards calling on the government to take all necessary steps to close the gap.

They are asking for: 1) an increase to the minimum wage to $10 per hour immediately; 2) full public funding of public sector pay equity adjustments; and 3) full funding of Pay Equity Commission and Hearings Tribunal and legal support services for women claimants, especially for those in the private sector where compliance is low and the pay gap is higher.

If you don’t like the idea that you’ll be working for free until the new year, get involved at www.equalpaycoalition.org.

The Law Lost

In all the excitement over an election being called few people noticed when a great opportunity to advance women in the top ranks of the Canadian legal system was wasted in a political pissing match.

A seat on the Supreme Court of Canada opened up in June when Justice Michel Bastarache retired.

Newfoundland is the only province to never have had a judge on the Supreme Court, and there was serious push to appoint the replacement from Newfoundland.

The Newfoundland front-runner was Justice Margaret Cameron, a 16-year veteran of the province’s appeal court and also fluent in French. Cameron was sworn in as the first female and youngest ever justice of the Supreme Court of Newfoundland. She had been an associate deputy minister of Justice for the province since 1981 and worked for the Department of Justice from 1975 until she was appointed to the bench.

If Cameron had been chosen to replace Bastarache it would have been the first time in Canadian history that women have out-numbered men on the Supreme Court bench.

A parliamentary committee was appointed to narrow down the possible candidates, but just before the election was called Prime Minister Harper bypassed the committee and nominated Nova Scotia's Justice Thomas Cromwell for the post. The appointment won’t be final until Cromwell faces a hearing before a panel of politicians from all parties.

Since then the Newfoundland justice minister Jerome Kennedy has come out saying that Harper purposely bypassed their province because of Premier Danny Williams’ anti-Harper comments.

“This is an example of Harper flexing his political muscle and saying to the people of Newfoundland and Labrador that this is what happens to you because of your premier,” Kennedy said in an interview. “I feel quite strongly that this is the Conservatives trying to further politically alienate this province and intimidate and subdue.”

These two alpha-males started locking horns and completely eliminated the chance to appoint a good female judge from a province that has never before been represented to that bench.

Those of us waiting for that landmark moment when women out-number men in the Supreme Court will just have to keep waiting, but I wouldn’t hold your breath.

- Thanks to Kim for the tip. 

Greens bust in to the old boys club

The decision has been reversed to allow Green party leader, Elizabeth May, into the national televised debates.

The Network Consortium, which represents Canada’s largest television networks and organizes the debates, decided to include Ms. May after the NDP and Conservatives dropped their threats to boycott the debate if the Green party was involved.

Since the Green party has a small percentage of the popular vote and an independent MP crossed the in the House of Commons to become the first Green MP, it only made sense for Ms. May to be included.

When she wasn’t it started a major uproar.     

It turns out public opinion does matter to politicians. Funny how it's always easier to get their attention right before a major election.

Ms. May will be the first female political leader in the televised debates in eight years, since NDP leader Alexa McDonough took part in 2000.

Now the attention turns to how this shift in dynamics will play out in the October television debates. Whether or not you agree with her politics, Elizabeth May is an excellent public speaker, and I’m sure she wouldn’t fight that hard to be heard if she didn’t have something to say.

No girls allowed at the debates?

If you needed any further proof that the big boys in the federal government don’t play well with others - here it is.

The Green party leader, Elizabeth May, is being excluded from the national televised debates because three of the other four party leaders (no one’s telling whether it’s the Conservative, Liberal, NDP or Bloc) threatened not to participate if she was included.

“It became clear that if the Green Party were included, there would be no Leaders’ Debates,” said a press release from the Network Consortium, which represents Canada’s largest television networks and organizes the debates. “In the interest of Canadians, the Consortium has determined that it is better to broadcast the debates with the four major party leaders, rather than not at all.”

Never mind that the Greens just got their first federal member of parliament.

Nothing gives people faith in politicians’ ability to run a country like hearing that they can’t even stand to be in the same room with a new party.

Whether or not you like the Green Party or agree with their tree-hugging ways is not the point.

The point is adding May to the debates could have actually made them interesting and it would have been nice to see the first woman included in the national television debates since Alexa McDonough ran the NDP five years ago. 

In Canada politics is still very much a man’s game. Women fill only 21 per cent of the seats in the House of Commons.

And other countries are starting to lap us. In the last six months Canada has actually slipped from 49th to 51st place for female representation when compared to the rest of the world.

That leaves us tied with China (where the One-Child Policy has resulted in 60 million missing girls thanks to sex selective abortions and female infanticide) and Italy (where a woman’s tight jeans are a get-out-of-rape-charges-free card and they just held an election centered around which party had the most hot women).

Makes you feel like singing the national anthem, doesn’t it?

Survivor Washington

Sometimes American politics are a lot more entertaining than Canadian. 

Even after the Hillary Clinton campaign ran aground, the US system still has women light-years closer to power than ours does at the moment.

And being safely removed from the system, watching Americans scrap it out for the presidency is more like watching a sporting event and less like watching someone decide whether to put a new 400 series highway through your home.

Rosie Dimanno wrote a great column about Obama’s recent choice for his vice-president candidate, Joe Biden, and Hillary Clinton’s new role as peace maker between the party fractions.   

Michelle Obama is now trying to recast herself as warm and motherly rather than intelligent and opinionated. She’s been getting some pretty harsh criticism, much like Clinton did as first lady, and is now paying her respect to the woman who came before.   

Just as I was about to pop the popcorn and settle in to enjoy the flashy show that is US politics, I stumbled across this article about an American single mother’s first trip to a soup kitchen with her children.

Suddenly it’s not just about wealthy educated women trying to break the mold of pearls and pencil skirts in American politics and it becomes impossible to ignore that these political debates do nothing to help real women struggling to provide for themselves and their children.

US politics will never be just entertainment again.

A one woman show

Toronto city councillor Maria Augimeri is taking some serious heat after that major propane explosion at Sunrise Propane Industrial Gases killed two people and covered the corner of Toronto she represents in asbestos.

It’s only natural that people are upset about the large blast near their homes, being evacuated and the damage to their property.

But this one woman is being left alone standing before the firing squads.

The MPP for the area hasn’t come before residents. Toronto Mayor David Miller is away on holiday and the agency that regulates propane operations, the Technical Standards and Safety Authority, also didn’t send anyone to the recent public meeting.

So it’s all on Ms. Augimeri to explain to 12,000 evacuees how this happened and what is being done about it.

She’s had to apologize for not holding up to the pressure well and telling the head of a local ratepayers association to ‘shut up’.

Snapping on a constituent is not a great political move but, given the size of the disaster she’s been left to clean up, can you blame her?