Thank you. I'll be making my statement in French.
Thank you for this invitation to appear before the Standing Committee on Science and Research. It is a great privilege for me to have the chance to share with you my research findings on wage inequality.
As a specialist in the management and economics of science, technology and innovation, I quickly became interested in the differences between men and women in science. I wanted to go beyond simple gender average comparisons, which always show women lagging behind men, to understand the factors that influence these gaps. I therefore examined how gender, age, funding, collaboration and position in networks influence scientific output and impact.
My research has shown that, for the same amount of grant funding obtained, women publish more than men. On the other hand, when men and women publish in scholarly journals with the same impact factor, the greater the proportion of women co‑authors, the less likely the article is to be cited. These results prompted me to investigate whether these differences in scientific output had an impact on the career progression and salary of female academics.
Also, as I was treasurer, then vice-president, of the Association des professeurs de l'École Polytechnique, I was also called upon to find ways to reduce the barriers faced by female professors, which slow down their careers and keep salaries below expectations. I'm happy to tell you that there is now retroactive promotion at Polytechnique so as not to penalize women who take maternity leave, for example.
The main part of my talk is about survey results. In 2017, I conducted an extensive pan-Canadian survey of academic salaries and explored all the bonuses and professional fees that are added to base salary and exacerbate gender pay differences in overall compensation. The study looked at market and performance bonuses, bonuses associated with research chairs, and administrative bonuses.
Both Statistics Canada's descriptive statistics and those from my survey show that men earn more than women, and that the gap widens as one progresses in one's career from assistant professor to full professor. There are fewer and fewer women at full professor level.
Survey data show that when it comes to administrative bonuses, men earn $16,000 compared to $9,000 for women. On the market bonus side, men earn $13,000 compared to $7,000 for women. The biggest gap is in professional fees: $25,000 for men and $13,000 for women.
While the gap between men and women at the rank of full professor is $7,000 if we consider just base salary, it rises to over $15,000 if we consider total compensation. So it's when it comes to total compensation that the gap is widest.
We also ran regression models to try and understand the pay gaps we were able to explain and those that might be judged to be a bit of discrimination. We showed that several factors explain the differences in overall compensation, which vary from 4% to 6% depending on the field. On average, it's not that huge.
Age, academic rank, discipline, career breaks, a more research-oriented career, but, above all, the various bonuses and professional fees explain the differences in overall remuneration between men and women. Once all these factors are taken into account, there are very few gender gaps that could be considered as discrimination and are not explained by all the variables we have included in the regression model. Only fees and administrative bonuses fall into this unexplained category.
For all elements of total compensation embedded in a collective bargaining agreement—for universities that have such agreements—such as the base salary associated with different academic ranks and certain bonuses associated with research chairs and performance, gender pay gaps are explicable. We do, however, have difficulty explaining the amount of bonuses.
We're starting to study this.
Since the chair is signalling that my time is up, I thank you. I can answer your questions in both French and English.