A New View of the Male/Female Pay Gap

Abstract

We construct a new time series on the Canadian female/male pay ratio. The new series is based on wage data rather than the earnings data that have been used in the past. Wages more closely correspond to the price of labour, while earnings combine information on the price of labour with information on decisions of how much to work. Our results reveal significant differences between the wage- and earnings-based series. Most importantly, the wage series reveals that women have continued to make progress over the last 15 years.

The Rise and Stall of Canada's Gender‐Equity Revolution

“…The growth has been reasonably linear although, if the series is divided in half, the slope for the earlier 22 years ( b = 0.39) is slightly steeper than for the last 22 years ( b = 0.31) consistent with, although weaker than, earlier evidence of a stall in gender equity. Drolet (:11) makes the important point that, if hourly wages are used to make comparisons, the gap has narrowed even more (but with a shorter time series), although she too notes that “there are only moderate declines in the wage gap for younger women from cohort to cohort”—again consistent with earlier stall evidence (see also Baker and Drolet ).…”

Top earnings inequality and the gender pay gap: Canada, Sweden, and the United Kingdom

“…25 This result supports the view that increases in top earnings inequality are becoming an important "swimming upstream" factor. 24 A negative sign on the share of the gender gap accounted by educational attainment has previously been noted in Canada (Baker and Drolet, 2010) and the United States (Blau and Kahn, 2016). 25 Using male coefficients instead of female coefficients, the explanatory power of our centile groups does not change much, going from 33% in 1990 to 43% in 2010 (Model 2).…”

“…More precisely, the centile groupings account for 16.5% of the gap in 1997 and 37% in 2015. However, as Baker and Drolet (2010) argued, the unexplained share of the gap is particularly large in Canada at 67% in 1997, and remains above the half mark in at 55% in 2010. 27 It is lower than the 62% found for the United States (using male coefficients) by Blau and Kahn (2016).…”

Removing the “Veil of Ignorance”: Nonlinearities in Education Effects on Gender Wage Inequalities

“…For example, in the United States, differences in human capital variables (education and experience) explain little of the gender wage gap observed in the last decade, while in Canada changes in human capital characteristics continue to play a relatively large role (Baker and Drolet ; Blau and Kahn ).…”