The persistent gap: New evidence on the Canadian gender wage gap
by
Marie Drolet
Business and Labour Market Analysis Division
Analytical Studies
Branch research paper series, No. 157
This article investigates the extent
to which factors not previously explored in the Canadian context account for wage
differences between men and women using data from the Survey of Labour and Income
Dynamics (SLID). Like other studies using standard decomposition techniques and
controlling for a variety of productivity-related characteristics, the results
demonstrate that men still enjoy a wage advantage over women: women's average
hourly wage rate is about 84% to 89% of the men's average. Unlike other studies,
controls for work experience and job-related responsibilities are used. Gender
differences in full-year full-time work experience explain at most 12% of the
gender wage gap. Gender differences in the opportunity to supervise and to perform
certain tasks account for about 5% of the gender wage gap. Yet, despite the long
list of productivity related factors, a substantial portion of the gender wage
gap cannot be explained.
Many studies rely on measures such as age or potential
experience (i.e. age minus number of years of schooling minus six) as a proxy
for actual labour market. Neither of these measures account for complete withdrawals
from the labour market nor for restrictions on the number of hours worked per
week or on the number of weeks worked per year due to family-related responsibilities.
The results show that proxies for experience yield larger adjusted gender wage
gaps than when actual experience is used.
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