OTTAWA—Women have only seen a small part of the action in the Conservative government’s “Economic Action Plan,” according to a new study of how the sexes are faring in federal stimulus spending.

As the federal government prepares to roll out a new budget on Thursday, a new study by a Queen’s University professor argues that men are seeing a disproportionate share of the benefits of Ottawa’s record spending over the past year.

According to Kathleen Lahey’s analysis, women have only received about 7 to 22 per cent of federal infrastructure spending, because they are under-represented in the construction, manufacturing and engineering industries.

By Lahey’s calculations, women are also not getting as much as men out of the billions Ottawa has committed to corporate, GST and personal-income tax cuts. And though women represent around 50 per cent of the population, they’re only seeing roughly a third of the enhancements to the employment-insurance program, according to Lahey’s study.

Lahey says that the top question for the government this week should be: “What will budget 2010 do to ensure that women receive fair shares of the benefits of these costly initiatives?”

Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s office rejects the suggestion that its budgets are friendlier to men.

“Our government is fully supportive of gender equality,” said Andrew MacDougall, a spokesperson for the Prime Minister’s Office. “Canada’s Economic Action plan was a recession-fighting plan to help all Canadians who needed it. We extended EI for all, we brought in tax cuts for all, we extended skills training for all and we invested in nearly 16,000 infrastructure projects that will benefit all Canadians.”

But there wasn’t much talk of women in Wednesday’s Speech from the Throne, beyond talk of rewriting the words to the national anthem to make it more gender-neutral, as well as a mention of improved benefits for sole-support single-parent families, which are overwhelmingly headed by women in Canada.

Lahey notes that the loss of Canada’s fledgling national child care program – scrapped by the Conservatives when they came to power in 2006 – also stands as a major loss for Canadian women in federal spending priorities.

She notes also in her study that of the $9.4-billion spent to date on stimulus, only $572,475 – or 0.00006 per cent—has gone to upgrading women’s shelters, while nearly triple that amount has been committed to upgrading three animal shelters in Canada.

Lahey based her calculations on the four-year period from when the Conservatives came to office in 2006 to the present. In her analysis, the infrastructure spending has been most disproportionately unfair to women, while personal tax cuts have been the most advantageous, though women only saw 40 per cent of those benefits, Lahey argues.

Just this week, the federal minister in charge of the Status of Women, Helena Guergis, was at the United Nations in New York, boasting of economic progress being made by Canadian women, in part because of government efforts on that score.

Guergis told the UN, for instance, that women represented 47.2 per cent of the workforce in 2009, and that in 2007, women earned 61 per cent of all university degrees diplomas and certificates compared to 55 per cent in 1998. She also said that women are starting small businesses at twice the rate of men, and women’s average incomes have increased almost 17 per cent since 2002.

Lahey was one of a number of contributors to a report that went earlier this month to the UN, to counter Guergis’s assertions of women’s progress. In that report, compiled by feminist and labour activists, the authors argue that there has been a “systematic erosion” of women’s rights in Canada over the past few years and that the country has actually moved backwards in this realm.

The UN is currently taking stock of women’s progress in all nations which took part in the 1995 Beijing conference on women. Canada was among those participants.

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