Thank you.
Good afternoon, committee members. We just want to give you a very high-level overview of the wage gap, which is significantly different from pay equity, but it gives you a sense of the broader context.
On slide 2 we give some definitions of what the gender wage gap is, which is the ratio of aggregate female to male wages, and it's used generally to measure income disparity between men and women. It is measured in a variety of different ways. It can look at full-time or full-year wages. It can also be measured in terms of job tenure, or on the basis of hourly wages. This is different from pay equity, which I don't have to tell this committee is defined generally as equal pay for work of equal value.
On slide 3 we give some of the estimates—although there are many—of Canada's wage gap. In 2011 it was about 30%, and within the federal public sector the wage gap is roughly 11%. If you measure full-time job tenure only, women earn roughly 20% less than men who are working full time. In the past, the wage gap closed rather quickly and seamlessly because more women were entering the labour market, but now there are so many women in the labour market the closing of the wage gap has actually slowed.
On slide 4 we provide some international rankings, and there you can see that Canada ranks 28th out of 34 OECD countries for the wage gap between male and female full-time full-year workers, and at about 20%, Canada falls below the OECD average of 15.6%. According to the World Economic Forum, Canada dropped 10 positions to 30th out of 145 countries, and is 80th out of 145 countries if you measure gender income inequality only.
Slide 5 talks about those groups who are most affected by the wage gap. Minority and indigenous women are affected according to their family status, with single mothers most likely to live in poverty, and mothers generally less likely to raise to senior positions. Age affects the wage gap with a smaller wage gap for younger women. Then, of course, there's regional differences as well that affect the wage gap.
On the next slide there's a list of factors contributing to the wage gap, and they're listed here. Pay equity is only one of them, so this presentation will focus on the other factors that are listed.
On slide 7 we talk about part-time work. Women have consistently made up about 70% of part-time workers since statistics became available in 1997. This is true in all age groups. Almost 40% of women working part time indicate they are doing so involuntarily. If they had other options, they may actually be working full time. Part-time work tends to provide less stability, including a lack of pension, vacation, and sick benefits.
Slide 8 shows labour market segmentation is another factor affecting the wage gap. The Canadian labour market does continue to be highly gendered with two-thirds of occupations being gender concentrated. There are more women in the service sectors, whereas men are overrepresented in goods-producing sectors. Many recent shortage occupations have been in male-dominated industries, such as engineering or trades, where women make less than men. Employment growth has been higher in STEM occupations, except I suppose slowing recently, but particularly for men. Women's representation in mathematics and computer science is at 36%, and architecture and engineering is at 30% for master's programs. Women are studying the sciences more than they used to, but they don't tend to then go on to work in the sciences as much.
The next slide talks about women's under-representation in management. They are gaining an increasing share of management positions. However, they are struggling to rise above middle management, and they accounted for 36% of management-level workers in 2014. At the senior management level they accounted for 32% where they were making less generally. The United Nations says that 30% is the tipping point for any kind of representation. We're sort of there in management and could be doing better.
Bias and discrimination is on slide 10. This is obviously a tough one to measure. There's an assumption that it does still feed into the wage gap, and 10% to 15% of the wage gap can by estimate be attributed to employer bias or discrimination. Pay equity regimes have, of course, been implemented across the country to address employer discrimination related to remuneration. A 2012 study found that all of Canada's designated employment equity groups face stereotypes and bias in employment. A Conference Board of Canada study found that millennial women are less likely to be identified as high potential than their male peers. The slide just continues to talk about the issue of bias and discrimination, and it can occur in relation to remuneration, hiring, job assignment, termination, promotion, compensation, and working conditions, all of which can feed into the wage gap.
Slide 11 talks about unpaid work. Women are still doing more of the care at home and doing more domestic work than their male counterparts. In 2010, the average total time women spent caring for children under five was 6.5 hours per day, while men spent just over three hours.
I won't go into all of the different details on this slide, but women are also taking care of more seniors, parents, or other kinds of dependants, and providing more intense care. Clearly, that also feeds into the wage gap.
The role of Status of Women, in addressing this, is that the minister has been mandated to work with departments to make meaningful progress in reducing the wage gap between women and men. We support other departments to integrate gender considerations into their policy and program initiatives, and to help think of promising areas where we could actually have some influence on the wage gap.
This is about ensuring that the right legislative tools and mechanisms are in place; strengthening labour market participation of women, for example, through child care supports; and enhancing women's participation in areas where they're under-represented to get at the labour market segmentation piece.
We're also working very closely with our colleagues in the provinces and territories to study the issue of the wage gap. At our upcoming meeting in June, we'll actually be rolling up our sleeves and digging into that issue by presenting some papers and research on the issue to the ministers.
With that, I close my presentation and pass it on to my colleagues.