I would like to begin by thanking the Committee for inviting me to share my thoughts on the Public Sector Equitable Compensation Act.
My name is Marie-Thérèse Chicha, and I am a professor at the School of Industrial Relations at the University of Montreal. I chaired the Committee which prepared the draft bill which eventually led to the Pay Equity Act in Quebec. I also had the honour of being a member of the Federal Task Force which produced the report entitled: “Pay Equity: A New Approach to a Fundamental Right”. I am appearing before the Committee today as an individual, and thus I am not representing the University of Montreal. I am also an expert on equality issues, and specifically, pay equity, for the International Labour Organization in Geneva.
My objective this morning is to review some of the salient aspects of the Public Sector Equitable Compensation Act, in relation to wage discrimination issue and the intended objective.
Gender-based wage discrimination refers to the practice of not giving equal pay for work of equal value based on gender. That principle is enshrined in Convention No. 100 of the International Labour Organization, which was adopted in 1950. Therefore, this principle has been recognized internationally for some 59 years now. This is not a new issue, and one might expect, since the problem has been around for 59 years — and perhaps even longer — that it would have been resolved by now.
However, what we are seeing is that there still exists a significant wage gap between men and women at this time. The 2006 census showed that the wage gap between men and women ranged from 72 per cent to 85 per cent, depending on age, and that this percentage is changing very slowly.
So, that is a very surprising result, given the enormous progress made by women in terms of their educational level and uninterrupted attachment to the labour market, factors which tended to penalize them previously but should no longer be in play.
So, why does there continue to be a wage gap? It is certainly due, in large part, to wage discrimination between so-called female-dominated and male-dominated jobs.
I think it would be useful to provide a quick overview of the causes of wage discrimination, in order to have a clear understanding of the need for well articulated, very specific legislation that directly addresses the problem.
The main cause of this gap is the invisibility of women's work. Assessment methods and compensation systems underestimate the different features of female jobs. For example, there is a belief that women's work involves no physical effort, no risk and no danger. As a result, in terms of assessing and setting compensation for women, such factors are not considered.
It is also believed that the underlying requirements of female jobs, such as caring for children, empathy and good interpersonal skills are innate factors. As a result, they are not considered for the purposes of compensation.
All of these different factors mean that female jobs are undervalued and, by that very fact, undercompensated. They are undervalued because the evaluation methods used in the corporate world are methods that were designed primarily for male-dominated jobs. They involve upward responsibility or working with very sophisticated or heavy equipment, such as trucks, dollies, and so on. These evaluation methods do not consider the special characteristics of female-type jobs.
Obviously, if the evaluation methods on which compensation systems are based are inherently biased--