Gender parity in leadership roles subject to pay-equity laws

OTTAWA — Statistics Canada said that more women are in leadership roles in the public sector where pay equity is the law than in the private sector, where similar rules don’t apply.

The report from the national statistics office released on International Women’s Day said gender parity existed in the public sector in 2015, when 54 per cent of legislators and senior government managers and officials were women.

The percentage of women in similar positions in the private sector was 25.6 per cent, the report said.

The number of women in the workforce has risen considerably over the past 70 years, jumping rapidly between the 1950s and 1990, but rising at a slower pace since then.

As of 2014, women’s labourforce participation reached 82 per cent, Statistics Canada said, compared with 91 per cent for men, narrowing a gap that was more than 70 percentage points in the early 1950s.

In 2015, just over half of Canada’s women worked in traditionally female occupations: teaching, nursing, social work, clerical positions, or sales and services, compared with 17.1 per cent of men — figures that have changed little over the past 30 years.

Women remain outnumbered in natural and applied science occupations that usually require a university degree.

As a result, women tended to occupy lower-paying jobs and earned less overall than men: Statistics Canada calculated that women earned 87 cents for every dollar earned by a man.

Looking across 46 occupation groups, Statistics Canada found women’s wages would rise on average by $2.86 per hour if men and women were paid equally.

The Liberals won’t move on pay equity legislation until 2018 at the earliest with the federal labour minister saying the law is more complicated than it sounds. Patty Hajdu said the government doesn’t want to impose burdens on employers.

In the meantime, Ottawa is focusing on skills training targeting women who go into non-traditional fields, such as the sciences and mining, and helping women who go into non-traditional jobs and leave because it is inhospitable for them to stay, Hajdu said.