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Toronto ranked 10th best city for women in Canada, study says

A study that looked at the best and worst places in Canada to be a woman ranked Toronto tenth out of 25 Canadian cities.

The study by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives looks at the gaps between men's and women's access to economic and personal security, education, health, and positions of leadership. It attributes the inequalities, at least in part, to discrimination based on sex.

Toronto falls behind Victoria and Vancouver, in its first and fifth place, and behind the Ontario cities of Hamilton and Kingston, in third and fourth place. It is also behind Quebec City, St. John's and Halifax.

But Toronto is ahead of Ottawa, Montreal, Winnipeg, Edmonton, Saskatoon, Regina and Calgary.

Victoria is listed as the best city to be a woman, while Windsor is ranked last. Toronto is moving in the right direction. Last year, the study placed Toronto in the eleventh spot.

"Statistics will never be a substitute for the full experience of lives lived. But as signposts they mark the spot where more attention is needed from our political leaders and policymakers," study author Kate McInturff, a senior researcher at centre, said in a news release. "We hope they follow through."

The study says both women and men are more likely to have full-time jobs in Toronto than they are nationally, and there's a smaller than average gap between women and men in full-time employment.

Women's paycheques in Toronto are slightly larger than the average, but women bring home $9,000 less per year than men in Toronto, according to the study.

The study also shows, poverty rates are above average for both men and women: 16.7 per cent of women and 16 per cent of men live above the low income line in the city.

In terms of education, women in Toronto are more likely than men to have completed high school, college or university.

Toronto is only second to Ottawa when it comes to having one of the most highly educated populations, with a total of 28 per cent of women and men holding university degrees.

Toronto is also slightly above average nationally in terms of women in leadership positions.

Women hold 39 per cent of management positions and make up 28 per cent of elected officials when city and regional councils are included.

Women live longer than men in Toronto

And in terms of health, life expectancy is higher in Toronto than the Canadian average.

Women live slightly longer lives than men in Toronto. Life expectancy is 85 years for women, 80 years for men in the city.

Personal security is harder to quantify generally across the country, the study says.

According to Statistics Canada's 2014 General Social Survey, 2.2 per cent of adult Canadians had suffered a sexual assault in the previous five years and 3.9 per cent had experienced violence from an intimate partner.

Those statistics translate to 111,377 incidents of sexual assault and 197,441 incidents of intimate partner violence over the same five years in Toronto.

The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives is an independent, non-partisan research institute concerned with issues of social, economic and environmental justice.