Whether employed or looking for work, it is useful for clients to be aware of the issues surrounding pay equity and the legal recourse available to obtain fair working conditions. CDPs can assist clients by helping them negotiate equitable compensation and guide employers to implement nondiscriminatory working conditions.
Pay equity has been guaranteed by Canadian laws for over 40 years yet a gap persists between men’s and women’s incomes. Moreover, a 2001 study showed that the wage gap between men and women could not be explained by gender – nor by education, age, or sector of employment. So how can we explain this gap? That’s the question Girard, Laflamme, and Tremblay wanted to answer, using data from the 2016 Canadian census.
The researchers first compiled the annual income of 498,044 people (242,523 women and 255,521 men). They found that women earned 67.6% of men’s salaries. Although men’s and women’s wages increase with age and level of education, women’s wages are always lower for the same category. There is only one exception: Part-time working men earn slightly less than women in the same employment situation, but the difference is less than $2,000 a year.
The researchers also analyzed wage differences by income bracket. According to the data, a higher proportion of women earn less than $50,000 a year, and women’s top salary ($414,316) is one third of men’s top salary ($1,236,606). These figures highlight that pay equity is not being achieved despite the measures put in place by the government since the 1960s.
The authors then analyzed the income averages for 2016 to determine which factor (gender, age, level of education, sector of employment, or type of job) had the greatest influence on income variation. The result is the same as in 2001: Gender is the factor that least explains the difference in income between the sexes. According to the article, this is due to the fact that being a man or a woman is less and less reducible to the category itself. Indeed, each gender is nowadays expressed in a multitude of modalities of being, diversity, similarities and differences, making the groups “women” and “men” less homogeneous than they once were. Today, women have greater access to education, can work in a variety of fields, and have relative autonomy when it comes to family planning, but they still suffer from pay inequity. Why? The study concludes that the system itself does not achieve pay equity because of the continuing institutional sexism. Indeed, the measures put in place to achieve pay equity are not effective, as they are based on the idea that women in situations of pay inequity must themselves file complaints, requiring them to be aware of the situation and to be willing and able to denounce it. In this context, it is important that our sector continues to support equal pay by sharing knowledge, supporting workers, and educating employers.
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