Michelle Ramonica is reentering the workforce with her own customer service consulting business.GEOFF ROBINS
Michelle Romanica is on the sunshine trail into employment. A woman on the move, in a hurry, using a slim window of time - in a car en route to a meeting in London, Ont. - to talk about pursuing her passion.
She is in the early stages of forming her own business. She has just registered her company website. After more than three decades as an award-winning customer-relations specialist with Air Canada, and four years mostly out of the labour market attending to her family, she's returning to work with her own consulting firm.
She is going to advise companies on how to change their business culture from what she calls being "product-and organization-centric to being customer-and-client-centric."
Ms. Romanica, 56, has the odds of a winner on her side.
An astonishing 60,000 women age 55 and over - an increase of 6.4 per cent - have successfully entered the labour force since the recession began in October, while hundreds of thousands of other Canadians have lost their jobs.
They're returning to work for many reasons: demographics; their children have finally made it into adulthood; and because their retirement investments have crashed, their partners have lost work and they're willing to take jobs maybe men don't want.
Across all ages, the gender gap in unemployment is the biggest since Statistics Canada began tracking it in 1976. Last month, the unemployment rate for men was 9.2 per cent, compared to 6.8 per cent for women, although women comprise nearly half the work force.
But it's older women who are the recession's true prize winners, says labour economist Armine Yalnizyan, co-author of a new recession labour-market study, Behind the Numbers.
The number of men in the labour market aged 55 and over is also increasing, but only by a third of the number of women. Every other cohort shows an employment decline, most dramatically among young men in the punching-bag manufacturing sector, leaving older women, in Ms. Yalnizyan's words, as "the reserve army of labour."
What workplace experts are finding is that older women have the pizzazz that fits with Canada's battered economy and labour market.
Seventy per cent of the jobs they've claimed are full time, said Ms. Yalnizyan, senior economist with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.
They're primarily finding employment in the real estate, finance and insurance sectors, as well as in the accommodation and food-service industries. They're starting their own businesses at an impressive rate - accounting in June for more than 15 per cent of all jobs held by women in the 55-and-over cohort.
Ms. Romanica, from Orangeville, Ont., 90 kilometres northwest of Toronto, acknowledged that financial pressure pushed her over her fear of starting a business. But she's also got purpose, with a capital P.
"I have some very definite thoughts on how to work with people to help them deliver that kind of customer service that I believe they still want to deliver," she said.
Dr. Bakr Ibrahim, director of the Centre for Small Business and Entrepreneurial Studies at Concordia University in Montreal, said evidence indicates women entrepreneurs are twice as successful as men.
Women tend to have larger and more formal networks. They focus on sharing, and have more of a team approach.
They're more frugal with resources, especially in the start-up phase. And they're more likely than men to recognize their weaknesses and ask for help.
Interestingly, said Dr. Ibrahim, a large percentage of women start up their own businesses late in life. They get frustrated working in a large organization when they hit the glass ceiling, and so they venture forth on their own, bringing a lot of management experience with them.
Geeta Sheker, director of the Initiative for Women in Business at University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management, said that despite current economic trends, demographic trends show a looming talent shortage, and it makes sense that companies are looking to bring back experienced women sooner rather than later.
"The number of women who are university graduates in Canada now surpasses men," she said.
"There is clear evidence that companies with more women in senior roles significantly outperform their competitors in return on equity, return on sales and return on invested capital."
At the same time, Ms. Yalnizyan noted that more than half of Canada's 1.6 million unemployed don't have employment insurance.
Welfare caseloads have spiked by 25 per cent or more in provinces such as Alberta and British Columbia.
Poverty rates have budged little over the past two decades, and Canadian families have never before struggled through a recession carrying so much household debt.
If, in her phrase, older women have become the reserve army of labour, they're standing on a scary battlefield.