Women still earning less
Posted Oct 13, 2010 03:42:43 AM.
This article is more than 5 years old.
Canadian women continue to earn less than men and a new report suggests motherhood may be the main reason for the gender difference.
According to the World Economic Forum’s annual gender gap survey, Canada ranks 20th in the world, behind such countries as Sri Lanka and Latvia. But that ranking is an improvement on our 25th position of a year ago.
On average, the estimated earned income for Canadian women is $28,315 compared with $40,000 for men.
Meantime, a separate report by TD Economics suggests that motherhood leads to unexplained, but significant wage losses for working women. Report authors Beata Caranci and Pascal Gauthier suggest this “motherhood gap” in wages largely occurs because of wage penalties mothers experience each time they exit and re-enter the workforce.
“Previous studies on wage differences by gender have found that roughly half of an observed 20 per cent gender gap cannot be explained by the usual factors that drive wages, such as experience, hours worked, occupation, industry, age and the like,” says Beata Caranci, Deputy Chief Economist, TD Economics. “The research leads us to conclude that exits from the labour force, most often related to family or motherhood — not gender — are the culprit behind this ‘unexplained’ wage gap.”
They found women without children tend to have similar wages to men with the same level of experience and education. Women with kids, meantime, suffer steeper wage penalties the more often they enter and exit the job market. The length of time they’re away and the “skills atrophy” they incur during their absence tend to cause a hit to their pay.
Caranci believes coming and going from the job market is interpreted as a negative signal by companies, resulting in its subsequent impact on wages. But that doesn’t mean all is lost for the career woman with multiple children.
“The more time you give yourself to build experience within a firm before you exit for any reason, even if it’s to take care of family members — children or parents — the less the wage gap will be when you return,” Caranci says in an interview with 570 News.
Other numbers from the World Economic Forum’s report show that the workforce has a participation rate of 75 per cent for women compared to 83 per cent for men, professional and technical worker positions are filled by women by more than half (57%) and Canadian parliament is only 22 per cent female.
