Good afternoon. Thank you very much for the opportunity to discuss the impacts of pay gaps among faculty at Canadian universities.
Before I begin, I would like to acknowledge that I'm speaking to you from the traditional territories of the people of the Treaty 7 region in southern Alberta. The city of Calgary is also home to the Métis Nation of Alberta, districts 5 and 6.
Pay inequity is a significant obstacle to achieving an equitable, diverse, inclusive and accessible Canadian post-secondary sector. Its impacts are uneven. It differentially impacts members of federally designated groups, including women, indigenous people, racialized or visible minorities and persons with disabilities. While lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and two-spirit people are not yet included among FDGs, this absence is recognized as an equity issue, as highlighted in the consultations by the Employment Equity Act review task force.
In the post-secondary sector, we have significant data gaps on the representation, attainment, experiences and wage gaps for all FDGs, and this is the case for members of the LGBTQ2S+ community. I might point out that these gaps were identified in the Royal Commission on Equality in Employment in 1984—the Abella report. We are still dealing with these issues 40 years on.
To understand pay gaps among faculty, we need to use an equity lens and an intersectional lens, because pay gaps disproportionately impact members of some groups of Canadian university professors more than others.
I want to briefly answer four questions: What does an intersectional equity lens show? What are some common articulated reasons for the gaps? What are the impacts of the gaps? I'll focus on those. What needs to be done to ameliorate those pay gaps? I will emphasize those.
First, with regard to what an intersectionality lens shows about the pay gaps of faculty, we can look at “Differences in Representation and Employment Income of Racialized University Professors” by Howard Ramos and Peter Li, in The Equity Myth. They highlight that incomes show that white male professors earn the most, followed by visible minority South Asian men and aboriginal men. Among those with the lowest mean incomes were visible minority Black women, Arab women, Asian women and South Asian women, all earning half of the average. While white female professors had the highest income, it is also notable that their income was clearly below the average of white males.
They go on to argue that, for some, this might be the result of underperformance, hiring, publication records, success in funding or willingness to offer services, but that's not enough. The data shows.... For that argument to hold convincingly—that visible minority professors systematically underperform in productivity compared to white professors at all levels—we would need to see this in the data. However, representation and earning outcomes cannot be easily dismissed by productivity differences alone.
Secondly, the Canadian Association of Universities Teachers' “Underrepresented & Underpaid” highlighted that full-time women university professors, on average, continue to earn significantly less compared to their white male counterparts. Racialized women professors experience a rate of unemployment that is almost twice as high as that of non-racialized women, and there's a persistent and indeed worsening gap between this group and both women who are not racialized and racialized men.
I can highlight, as well, that in the policy brief for the Employment Equity Act review task force, it was shown that the wage gap was wider for indigenous women, women with disabilities, racialized women and newcomer women. In effect, intersectional analysis matters.
What accounts for these gaps?
It's educational attainment, job tenure, part-time versus full-time, unionized versus non-unionized, but also biases in discretionary university compensation, for example, merit determination, retention determination, salary adjustments and market supplements. Sociologists Ramos and Li also highlighted human capital factors, seniority, productivity and discrimination. Economists Blau and Khan also say that 62% of the wage gap can be explained by factors such as “occupational segregation”, full-time versus part-time, rank and experience.
However, the full 38% cannot be explained by these quantitative factors alone. They suggest that discrimination is a factor.
What are the implications? They're profound—