Imagine a couple in their late fifties. They own a home and rental property, hold RRSPs and report a healthy household net worth as measured by Statistics Canada’s Survey of Financial Security (SFS).

What the data does not tell you? The properties are in his name, the savings are mostly his and she has spent two decades working part time to raise their children. On paper, the household looks fine. In reality, she is poor and he is rich. Canada’s statistics were never built to see the difference.

Canada doesn’t measure wealth at the individual level. It measures it at the household level using what Statistics Canada calls the economic family unit. The result is that the gender wealth gap — the disparity between men’s and women’s accumulated assets net of debt — cannot be quantified.

While the gender pay gap has rightly received decades of attention, the wealth gap remains absent from policy debates because we don’t properly measure it. That must change. Statistics Canada must reform the SFS and begin collecting individual wealth data.

Wealth is not a luxury indicator

Income tells you what someone earns. But wealth tells you what they could survive on if the paycheque stopped. It is also the foundation of retirement security, the collateral behind a business loan, the cushion that lets someone leave a bad job or an unsafe relationship. Gender-equity policy should, therefore, target the wealth gap as directly as it has targeted the wage gap, including by reforming retirement subsidies and family law to protect those — often women — who lack asset ownership.

None of this is possible when the gender wealth gap cannot even be assessed. In Canada’s wealth surveys, including the SFS, couples report their combined........

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