Growing Pains: Parenthood and the Gender Training Gap

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought into stark relief the gender inequities facing women in the workforce. Though women were already statistically far more likely than men to forego job advancement opportunities in order to attend to child rearing or other familial responsibilities, pandemic lockdowns forced scores of women to take on childcare full-time. In order to ameliorate the worst effects of pandemic-related gender disparities in career advancement, employers and policymakers should consider on-the-job training as an essential tool in ensuring women’s upward career mobility. Having access to these training and educational opportunities is vital to supporting women in their efforts to return to work at the same level of human capital they exited with during the pandemic. However, as this report reveals, on-the-job training is less accessible for women for exactly the same reasons that interrupt their career advancement in the first place: the expectation that women will take on the lion’s share of familial responsibilities. In addition to providing vital data on the disparities between men and women with regards to on-the-job training opportunities—as well as describing some reasons for why those disparities exist—this report provides clear recommendations to policymakers on how to narrow the wage gap between the genders and provide opportunities to develop talent pipelines for women in male-dominated workplaces and occupations.Government of Canada’s Adult Learning, Literacy and Essential Skills Program Canadian Research Data Centre Network from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), Canadian Institutes of Health Research, Canadian Foundation for Innovation and Statistics Canada