Thank you, Chair.
I join you from St. John's at Memorial University—not Laurier—on the island portion of Newfoundland and Labrador, which I will begin by acknowledging as the unceded homelands of the Beothuk and Mi'kmaq peoples.
I am vice-president of the Canadian Association of University Teachers, which represents over 72,000 teachers, researchers, librarians and general staff at universities, colleges and polytechnics across the country. I'm also a professor at Memorial University, which recently completed a gender pay gap study that identified and compensated women, including me, for salary inequalities.
Thank you to the committee for undertaking this important study. I want to make four main points in my opening remarks, and I'll be glad to elaborate more in the questions and answers.
First, to better understand the diverse and intersecting factors that contribute to pay inequities in universities and colleges, we need more robust demographic and compensation data from institutions for both full-time and contract academic staff. The federal government can offer leadership by supporting the collection of this data through the expansion of Statistics Canada's university and college academic staff system survey, or UCASS, as a start.
Second, thanks to UCASS, we have fairly robust data on the gender pay gap for full-time university professors. The raw pay gap does not account for differences in observable characteristics, but it is a first step in understanding pay differences between subpopulations.
For women professors working full-time in Canadian universities, that raw gap is 10% less on average than their male counterparts. This gap is driven largely by differences of discipline, rank and age. Even after adjusting for these factors, however, we still find a gender pay gap of about 4%, and this remaining gap is most likely explained by the kinds of factors that my colleague mentioned, like starting salaries—which are often negotiated individually—by merit pay and market differential awards, and by differences in time to promotion.
Each of these factors is an opportunity for bias that can result in differential compensation. In short, we need a broader analysis and reform of the salary structure in academia.
In lieu of institutional data on salaries tied to factors beyond binary gender, we have looked at census data for university professors and college instructors. This data should be read with some caution, but we find that the raw pay gap for racialized and indigenous post-secondary teachers is wide, and it's even wider for racialized and indigenous women. It's 10% for racialized university teachers, rising to 25% for racialized women university teachers.
Employment status is a likely factor in the large pay gaps seen in the census data, as equity-deserving group members are most likely under-represented in the highest ranks and in full-time academic work.
Thirdly, universities and colleges need to look at equity hiring in disciplines traditionally dominated by men and at conducting routine pay equity exercises. Academic staff associations have been actively working to bring about these changes in collective agreements. They've also been negotiating contract language around the provision of information and compression of salary scales, and “stop the tenure clock” language to help women accelerate their time to promotion.
My fourth and final point is that the federal government has a key role to play in supporting academic staff associations to eliminate pay discrimination in the academic workforce. It can support the collection of broader demographic data in the UCASS salary survey, including on race, gender identity, disability and indigeneity, and do so for all staff—full-time and part-time.
Doing so will help identify and assess how single, dual or multiple sources of disadvantage combine to affect salaries and other forms of compensation. It can also support efforts to eliminate discrimination through a strengthened federal contractors program, requiring compliance with federal employment equity, pay transparency and pay equity requirements.
Lastly, the federal government can work with the provinces to renew the academic workforce and create more full-time tenured positions. Current labour force survey estimates show that one in three university professors is on part-time or part-year contracts without fair compensation, including access to benefits, pensions, professional development or research funds. The lack of faculty renewal is a structural barrier to achieving employment equity and, therefore, pay equity among academic staff.
Thank you. I look forward to the discussion.