Women’s Economic and Leadership Opportunities Fund

Women continue to face persistent pay equity challenges, underrepresentation in high-paying jobs, a disproportionate load of caregiving responsibilities, and a lack of pathways for career growth. Women and Gender Equality Canada (WAGE) invests in women’s and equality-seeking organizations across Canada to remove barriers that prevent women from fully participating in the economy.

Through the Women’s Economic and Leadership Opportunities Fund, WAGE will help organizations launch new systemic change projects or scale-up past projects that promote women’s economic security and prosperity. The funding will help unlock economic and leadership opportunities for women, leading to a more prosperous and resilient economy for everyone in Canada.

Objective of the fund

The goal of the Women’s Economic and Leadership Opportunities Fund is to address systemic barriers to women’s economic participation and success, which includes:

• harassment
• discrimination
• limited access to mentors and networks
• lack of flexible work arrangements

Since diverse women face multiple barriers, many projects funded under the Women’s Economic and Leadership Opportunities Fund also takes this complexity into account.

The funded projects will advance gender equality through one or more of the following ways:

• Changing gender norms and attitudes by working to change beliefs, assumptions, and stereotypes based on gender and other identity factors.
• Supporting changes to authority, voices at the table, and decision-making power by working to address power imbalances to ensure women are part of the dialogue and solution.
• Increasing networks and collaboration by building and strengthening partnerships to work across sectors and break down silos.
• Encouraging more effective and equitable sharing of resources by sharing, mobilizing, and redistributing resources to support equality.
• Changing policies and practices by creating, changing, or removing policies and practices to address sexism and other barriers to gender equality.

What is a systemic change project?

Systemic change refers to changing social or institutional elements in a way that allows women and girls to fully take part in the economic, social, democratic, and political life of Canada.

Systemic change projects aim to address or remove the systemic barriers to gender equality. They do not try to change women to fit or adapt to already established systems that disadvantages them and prevents their full participation.

Projects funded under the Women’s Economic and Leadership Opportunities Fund will work to enable systemic changes that improve women's economic security and prosperity. They will also work to increase women’s representation as leaders and decision-makers through systemic change.

Reaching northern communities

Women’s and Indigenous women’s organizations serving Canada’s northern communities are vital to connecting women to supports and services, but they often face barriers to accessing federal funding, such as limited resources, competition with higher-capacity organizations and administrative obstacles.

To address these barriers, Women and Gender Equality Canada (WAGE) collaborated with women’s and Indigenous women’s organizations to develop funding applications, showcasing their knowledge of the needs of women and Indigenous women across the North, highlighting their broad distribution and service networks, and outlining their strong partnerships in northern communities. This approach resulted in 16 additional successful applications from northern-serving organizations in the 2024 to 2026 funding cycle.

Helping these organizations access capacity-building funding will improve their ability to promote equal opportunities for all women in the North.

Funded projects

• List of organizations