Gender Equality Week

September 22^nd to 28^th is designated as Gender Equality Week in Canada.

Gender Equality Week provides an opportunity to raise awareness of the important contributions women and gender diverse communities have made, celebrate achievements and accomplishments, and address gender equality gaps that exist in Canada.

This year’s theme is Unlocking Potential: Economic Power Through Gender Equality. As the barriers to gender equality are broken down, opportunities can be created that benefit everyone economically.

At Covenant House Vancouver, we provide young people with the stability and structure necessary to build a positive futures and make informed choices for their lives. These choices may include pursuing an educational path and/or finding employment.

We recently spoke to Kathleen Cashin, the Manager of Program Innovation at Covenant House Vancouver, about the importance of using a gender-based lens when developing programs to help young people.

Kathleen defines a gender-based lens as “being able to look at a particular person’s experience in the context of the gender gaps that are systemic and built into our society and hopefully work to change them.”

The gender gap in employment is one of the areas where a gender-based lens can help to analyze the problem of unemployment or underemployment of women.

“When we look at employment rates and see that women are in less skilled roles than men or have less employment compared to men, we can think about how gender disparity discrimination leads to that,” Kathleen says. “We can look at discrimination from a systemic gender lens [the role society, the government or employers play, for example] rather than an individual gender lens [an individual’s actions].”

Kathleen also points out that queer youth and Indigenous youth also face discrimination in the workplace. 2SLGBTQAI+ youth can be excluded from workspaces where they can’t be their gender identity or are discriminated against for being their gender identity.

“If you’re in a work situation where there’s discrimination, you use so much energy just trying to figure out how to get through the day,” Kathleen says. “At Covenant House, we use a trauma- and violence-informed approach, which allows us to take into account how people react in spaces. Trauma-informed focuses on what happened to the individual. A violence-informed approach takes into account the violent forms of oppression in our society.”

“When we combine these approaches, we can then see that young people’s behaviour makes sense. We’re then able to create safe spaces for youth, where they won’t have to expend their energy to just stay safe but can use it to pursue their own goals.”

Young people have the opportunity to learn life skills at Covenant House that can help them achieve their personal, educational, and career goals.

The Rights of Passage program and the Crisis Program, for example, focus on 10 categories of life skills that youth can develop:

Kathleen notes that these skills are non-gendered; they’re practical skills that everyone needs to learn.

Other skills youth can learn are more intangible. Applying a gender-based lens can help youth recognize that systemic issues such as patriarchy and discrimination may be behind their unemployment or lack of opportunity.

“If you don’t call it out for what it is, young people believe that what they can or can’t have in their lives is because of their gender,” Kathleen says. “If we can call it out for what it is, that it’s patriarchy, that it’s discrimination, and affirm for youth what their rights are, then we can make sure that youth are supported in asserting their rights.”

When youth are aware of their rights and no longer view gender as a barrier, they become empowered to pursue their goals and accomplish their dreams.

Thank you, Kathleen, for sharing your enthusiasm and insights!