How can we better support breastfeeding mothers, particularly after they return to work? These are some of the policies and practical changes that evidence shows would make a difference.
Immigrant women disproportionately work caring for children, elderly adults and people living with disabilities. At the same time, immigrant care workers earn low incomes and experience precarious employment.
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Research shows a classed and racialized divide among women caring for their children in Canada today. It’s a divide that is having a negative financial impact on immigrant women doing this work.
Karina Gould pauses to talk to reporters as she carries her three-month-old baby, Oliver Gerones, following a cabinet meeting on Parliament Hill in Ottawa in May 2018.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Sean Kilpatrick
Karina Gould’s parental leave is similar to that of many Canadians. Yet there are key differences, and they offer lessons on how parental leave could be redesigned to help more Canadian parents.
Female leaders tend to open people’s perceptions of what is possible for other women in politics – but the job is also still fraught with double standards and unique risks.
The domestic workers’ place of work, as a private household, is difficult to monitor. It is therefore challenging for government to enforce current legislation.
Caring for a newborn can be joyous.
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Labour MP Stella Creasy’s battle over maternity pay shows the need for gender-sensitive parliaments.
The physical and psychological symptoms experienced during and after pregnancy loss can be profound, including trauma, heavy blood loss, fatigue, poor concentration and severe abdominal cramping. Workplaces need to treat pregnancy loss seriously.
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Research shows women who have experienced miscarriage are at twice the risk of experiencing depression and anxiety and four times the risk of suicide. That’s why workplaces need to step up.
Most U.S. parents who take time off work to tend to newborns currently use unpaid leave.
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If the plan is fully phased in as proposed, workers could get up to $4,000 a month for a total of 12 weeks in paid leave to care for a newborn, another loved one or themselves within 10 years.
Giving new dads ‘fathers-only’ leave is one way to support women’s equality.
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East Germany strongly encouraged mothers to participate in the labour market full-time, whereas West Germany propagated a more tradition male breadwinner model.