Diversity in Canada, as Single Women Catch Up with Men, but Married Ones Suffer Big Pay Gap

Women have essentially attained the same educational and employment levels as men in Canada, but married women lag behind men significantly in wages, and women are making uneven gains in management.

Women made up 47% of the Canadian work force in 2004. But they are concentrated in so-called traditional female jobs, with 2 in 3 working in nursing, teaching, clerical and administration, or sales and services. Fewer than 1 in 3 men worked in these sectors.

Women made up 37% of Canadian managers in 2004, according to Catalyst Canada data, up from 30% in 1987. But the share of senior managers, at 22%, was down from 26% in 1996.

Women are about as educated as men. Among younger Canadians, women hold more degrees and are more likely to be in school. More than half of advanced-degree students, including MBA candidates, are women.

Statistics on Canada show that never-married women working full-time make 94% of their male counterparts’ earnings in 2003.with such women over age 45 earning more than their male counterparts.

But Canadian women in general (read, including the vast majority who get married) earned on average 62% of what men earned, and women working full-time made 70% of their male colleagues’ pay.

Worse, women in managerial positions, as well as business and financial professionals, made only about 60% of their male counterparts’ pay. There had been no significant reduction in the overall gap in the preceding 10 years.

And need we say it? Women ages 25 to 54 spend almost double the time on unpaid work around the house than men, though the amount of housework per day has fallen by half an hour, to 4.3 hours a day; men picked up four-fifths of that drop, to reach an average of 2.5 hours of housework daily.

A report provided to WOMEN-omics.com by Alison M. Konrad, the Corus Entertainment Chair in Women in Management at the University of Western Ontario’s Richard Ivey School of Business, concluded: “Between time lost at work to family and personal responsibilities and time spent on housework (and child/elder care), women continue to carry the ‘double load’ of family and work. The fact that single, never-married women are the only group who earn almost as much as their male counterparts suggests that the largest single obstacle to women’s greater economic empowerment is the extra burden of family and household responsibilities that fall to women as per traditional roles of the household division of labour.”