What is the BC Gender Equality Report Card?
The Gender Equality Report Card assesses BC’s progress in advancing gender equality over a given time period. It is an advocacy tool to hold the BC government accountable to respecting the human rights of women and/or people who are marginalized based on their gender identity or expression. The Report Card educates the public on key human rights and gender justice issues in the province, what actions have been taken by the provincial government, and the areas where action is overdue.
The most recent Report card assesses BC’s progress in advancing gender equality from January 2021 to December 2022 and focuses on two key areas: economic security and access to health care. Read the 2021/2022 BC Gender Equality Report Card.
Past BC Gender Equality Report Cards have assessed the province’s performance in the six issue areas West Coast LEAF focuses on: access to justice; access to health care; freedom from gender-based violence; rights of parents, children, and youth; economic security; and justice for people who are criminalized.
Our BC Gender Equality Report Card 2019/2020 was the first of our report cards to weave in firsthand knowledge generously shared by members of three community organizations: PACE Society, Urban Native Youth Association, and the Coalition Against Trans Antagonism. In December 2020, West Coast LEAF published a special edition of the Report Card evaluating BC’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. The three community partners once again shared their insights to guide our research and analysis for the COVID-19 BC Gender Equality Report Card.
How is this different from the CEDAW Report Card?
For 10 years, West Coast LEAF published the CEDAW Report Card annually, grading the BC government on its adherence to the Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) over the past year. CEDAW is a United Nations (UN) Convention that “defines what constitutes discrimination against women and sets up an agenda for national action to end such discrimination.” As the UN CEDAW Committee only reports on Canada every four years, the Report Card would monitor BC’s compliance with the Convention between reporting periods in order to hold the government accountable to both UN standards and BC women.
In 2018 we shifted our mandate from focusing only on women to focusing on all people who are marginalized based on their gender, including trans people of all genders (not only women), Two-Spirit people, people with non-binary gender identities, and gender non-conforming people. Our new mandate is to use the law to create an equal and just society for all women and people who experience gender-based discrimination in BC. Because of this, we have expanded the scope of our Report Card to include all individuals who experience gender-based discrimination.
Read more about our work relating to international law.
Webinar on the BC Gender Equality Report Card 2019/2020
We were pleased to offer a free 60-minute webinar summarizing the findings of the BC Gender Equality Report Card 2019/2020 in partnership with Courthouse Libraries BC. Lawyers were eligible for CPD credit for attending. Thank you to Courthouse Libraries BC for their generous work to make the webinar possible!
View the archived webinar video or the webinar PowerPoint slides.
Read our past Report Cards
COVID-19 BC Gender Equality Report Card
BC Gender Equality Report Card 2019/2020