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Résumé (français)

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Résumé (anglais)

The gender wage gap remains an important area of research in Canada. Schirle (2015) examined the gender gaps in average hourly wages facing private sector workers across Canada and found that all provinces made progress toward narrowing the gender wage gap since 1997. However, progress varies substantially: Ontario’s gender log wage differential fell from 0.25 to 0.19 over the 1997-2014 period; Alberta’s gap barely moved, from 0.33 in 1997 to 0.30 in 2014. Schirle (2015) finds that in all provinces a large portion of the gap remains unexplained in that gender differences in job characteristics, education, age, and marital status explain less than half the wage gap. Among those factors that explain the gap, gender differences in industry and occupation remain the most prominent. Gender differences in occupation are consistently identified as an important factor underlying gender wage gaps. Vincent (2013) examined the Canadian literature and finds the professional choices made by women (represented by their representation across occupations) is one of the most important explanatory variables of the wage gap. Blau and Kahn (2016) have provided recent evidence for the United States also demonstrating that gender differences in occupation and industries remain important for understanding current wage gaps. While women in the U.S. have become more likely to work in professional jobs over the 1981-2011 period, many remain employed in traditionally female professional occupations such as nursing or K-12 teaching, which are less lucrative than traditionally male professions. In this study we aim to develop a better understanding of what it means to say the gender gap is accounted for by gender differences in occupation. On one hand, it may be that different occupations require different levels of skill. As men and women tend to enter different occupations, gender wage gaps may reflect skill differentials. On the other hand, it may be that occupations requiring the same level of skill are compensated differently, along the lines of gender. We might expect that the returns to skill in female dominated occupations are lower than returns to the same skills in male dominated occupations. Such results may speak to whether skills are systematically undervalued in female-dominated jobs. It does not, however, inform us of why women continue to dominate these lower-paying jobs. In what follows we use information from Canada’s Labour Force Survey to examine the gender gap in hourly wages for Ontario’s private sector workers. The innovation in this study is to incorporate measures of skill requirements within occupations, including social skills, general intelligence, fine motor skills, visual skills, physical strength skills and analytical/quantitative skills. We demonstrate the relative importance of accounting for specific skills as representing productivity differences rather than a general set of occupation indicators that may reflect both gender differences in productivity and occupational segregation and discrimination.