Canada: Officially the First Country with Majority Female Workforce - Building Gender Balanced Business

• A summer 2009 Statistics Canada labour report contained a critical nugget of data: More women than men were employed in the country, making Canada the first to cross that critical threshold.

• Other countries may very well already have majority-female workforces, probably the United States and possibly Australia, but there has been no official confirmation as of yet.

• The Statistics Canada report showed that about 7.1 million women were gainfully employed in the first half of 2009, while only 6.9 million men were working. (The figures do not include self-employed people or those who are unemployed but actively seeking work.)

• Women made up more than half of the workforce of people both below and above 25 years of age.

• But while the milestone is one that reflects the population and the gradual growth of female employment over decades, it was reached not so much via gains for women but because of lost jobs for men: While female employment rose 0.6% in the preceding year, male employment dropped 1.7%.

• “Nobody should break out the Champagne here,” Laurell Ritchie, a national representative with the Canadian Auto Workers’ union, told The Canadian Press. She was among the first to notice the figures, and contacted the official agency for confirmation.

The Canadian Press report