Pay equity is not a one-time fix
I was in high school when the Ontario government passed the Equal Pay Act.
At the time, working women earned 44.4 per cent less per year, on average, than working men in this province.
This was not the result of overt discrimination: female lawyers making less than their male counterparts, for example, although there was some of that. It stemmed more from pervasive, cultural discrimination; “women’s work” was considered less important than real work, done by men. So nurses and secretaries earned less money, as a rule, than police officers and construction workers, despite similar education and seniority.
The act was intended to be the cure. It required public service and businesses to develop plans to close the gap by the early 1990s, and set aside 1 per cent of their annual payroll for wage adjustments to underpaid women.
Since then, I’ve aged 28 years, and so has Ontario. A laptop has replaced my typewriter, and my Sony Walkman has long since gone to Value Village. I eat dinner with my husband and kids now, not my parents and little sister.
Yet the gender pay gap has stubbornly remained.
Today, on average, women earn 31.5 per cent less than men over the year.
This, despite the fact that women have flooded into universities and the job market. (We now make up 62 per cent of university undergraduate students and 48.4 per cent of the Ontario labour force.)
Thirteen lousy percentage points over three decades. How depressing is that?
Some of this can be explained by part-time work, which women do more of. But when you examine the hourly wages of men and women, there’s still a 12-per-cent difference.
“No matter how you look at it, it is not a pretty picture,” said Parbudyal Singh, a human resources management professor York University.
Singh is a member of the province’s Gender Wage Gap Steering Committee, struck by the province last April to study this lingering problem, and come up with a plan to finally — here’s hoping — solve it.
It held its first public town hall in Richmond Hill on Monday night.
Some two dozen women arrived to listen, offer advice and tell their stories.
“I can’t retire, and I’m in my 60s already,” said Maureen Silverman, a midwife in Vaughan.
Midwifery seems the model pay equity case — not only are the workers almost all women, but so are their clients.
When they were first regulated by the province in 1994, the government did a pay-equity scan and rated midwives’ salaries between those of nurse practitioners and family doctors at community health centres.
Two decades later, midwives make less than half the salary of community physicians. They’ve appealed to the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal for more pay.
Silverman is her family’s sole provider, like many midwives who are mothers and whose partners are therefore stay-at-home parents (since it is hard to find child care to cover 4 a.m. calls to labour).
“Coming into midwifery, you are not going to make the money you need,” she said. “You can’t afford to live.”
That’s the thing about pay equity. It’s not a one-time fix. It requires vigilance.
Lorris Herenda also spoke. She is the executive director of the Yellow Brick House, a shelter for abused women and children in Richmond Hill. The shelter’s board followed the act and boosted its almost entirely female staff’s pay to the rate of hospital social workers in 2002. It cost the shelter about $56,000 a year, but that extra money never flowed from the government. Each year, the shelter has had to raise it itself, Herenda said.
That’s been possible in affluent York Region. But few of the province’s 140 shelters can manage it.
According to Ontario Equal Pay Coalition members, the province has not increased funding for pay equity for most social services agencies since 2006.
What’s missing is cash and enforcement.
A young woman took the microphone at the back of the small hotel conference room. She worked in a traditionally male profession, she said. Her problem isn’t pay. It’s culture. The hours are long, the work demanding: think law, research, journalism. (She didn’t want her name in the paper, understandably.)
“I’ve delayed having children because of my career,” she said. “Flexibility will not be easy, even during pregnancy. People look at you different. They put you on the baby track . . . ” If she ever does have children, she says, “I don’t see myself being able to stay in the same career.”
If the pay gap weren’t complicated, we’d have long filled it by now.
I’m glad the provincial government has commissioned a plan. Because one thing is clear: it won’t fix itself. Catherine Porter can be reached at cporter@thestar.ca.