Older Women Returning to Work in Canada - Building Gender Balanced Business

• For a multitude of reasons, older women are returning to work in sharply higher numbers.

• In Canada, 60,000 women over the age of 54 found jobs since the start of the recession in October 2008, a 6.4% increase, even as overall unemployment soared.

• The crosscurrent is part of the general gender gap trend in unemployment: The jobless rate for women is 6.8% in Canada, vs. 9.2% for men, with women getting ever closer to making up half of the workforce.

• Areas of new concentrations of women are among the most battered of the recession: real estate, finance, insurance, hotels, food service.

• Older men, too, are returning to the workforce, but at only a third the number of women.

• Armine Yalnizyan, a labour economist who recently analysed data related to the recession, told The Globe and Mail that older women are “the reserve army of labour”.

• The reasons the women are getting jobs are numerous: empty nests, setbacks to their retirement portfolios, unemployed partners, and perhaps most importantly, their willingness to take jobs men prefer to spurn. “[O]lder women have the pizzazz that fits with Canada’s battered economy and labour market,” The Globe and Mail says.

The Globe and Mail article