Thank you so much, Mr. Chair and members, for the invitation to speak on this issue of critical importance.
My name, as you know, is Ivy Bourgeault. I'm speaking to you as the University of Ottawa research chair in gender, diversity and the professions.
I have been in academia uninterrupted since 1985 as a student and since 1998 as a faculty member. I have written on gender inequity in academia in national and international journals, and I have provided testimony on gender-based pay gaps to the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal in the case of health professions where women predominate.
Let me state plainly that there exists a gender pay gap among Canadian faculty. This is a fact both within and across faculty. Data shows that the gap is widening among all faculty ranks. A 2019 article by Momani and colleagues measures gender pay gaps in the Ontario public post-secondary education sector from 1996 to 2016 using the public sector salary disclosure data, so that's everybody who earns over $100,000. They found gaps widening among all faculty ranks. Men were paid on average 2.14% and 5.26% more than women faculty for all university teaching staff and deans, respectively. Keep in mind that these are only data covering those above $100,000. These trends are muted in that case.
Using a robust methodology that tries to tease apart the different factors that are independently related to compensation, the majority of the gap can be attributed to factors that can be “explained”. This includes rank, department, years at rank and whether someone is a research chair. It is important to stress that these independent factors are in and of themselves influenced by gender and other forms of inequity. For example, if you are a woman, it takes longer to be promoted into higher ranks. This is something that we call “the sticky floor hypothesis”. Fewer women are observed in higher-paid disciplines, schools or faculties. Finally, there is robust research to show that women are less likely to hold prestigious research chair positions.
Other reasons to explain this gap include what is called a “pipeline issue”. This argues that women have not yet reached the ranks of academia in sufficient proportion for the gender pay gap to lessen. Momani and colleagues' analysis refutes this: “women's years of experience in academia do not mitigate the observed pay gaps.”
Labour productivity is another argument, which says that a woman's lack of progression could be justified if she is less productive or less experienced than her colleagues. As you know, productivity in academia is measured by research grants and publications. Less attention is paid to teaching, supervision and service work. Women are more likely to be assigned to more onerous academic service work, what we call “academic housework”, and women are also likely to supervise women students looking for same-gender mentors, who are more likely to take leave during their studies for parental reasons, which affects their productivity as students as well as that of their supervisors.
We also have to take into consideration the impact of the pandemic. It has become clear that the pandemic holds important implications for gender inequality in a variety of realms, including academia. “He's Working from Home and I'm at Home Trying to Work” is an apt descriptor that Martucci and others used to describe how women faculty were more likely to take on child care activities during lockdown, significantly affecting their productivity, especially in terms of publication and research grants, which are the key reasons for promotion and tenure.
Another descriptor is the disappearing research agendas of mother scholars in academia during the COVID-19 pandemic. Being more likely to teach, women faculty spent more time in the shift to online teaching even before the pandemic, but also, during the pandemic, women faculty were more likely to be approached by students with mental health concerns, which compounded during the pandemic and added significantly to their emotional labours. These impacts have legacy effects.
What about the other forms of inequity? This is much more challenging because we lack data in the Canadian context. Where data does exist, it points to greater inequities for Black women, indigenous women and women of colour in academia, especially around the emotional care labour, around inequities that rose up in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement and the discovery of over 10,000 graves around residential schools.
Moreover, compensation should be seen as more than just salary. It can take a variety of forms, such as release time, research funding, size of office, time to tenure and promotion, and workloads. There is very little systemic data collected on these factors, all of which are inequitably distributed along gender and other lines. Pay gap studies typically take a narrow view of compensation, with a focus on salary differentials, and even those with that narrow focus often do not reflect on the long-term implication in terms of pensions, and that is significant and compounded every single year.
I hope that I've made the case for how action is needed now and action of a structural nature. This is not about fixing women and diverse genders and faculty of diverse background. Baker and colleagues this year made a case for pay transparency. Promotion transparency is another facilitator, and I'm happy to speak to other factors.
Thank you.