We’ve been talking about gender discrimination in the workplace and the “glass ceiling” for decades.
Usually the conversation focuses on salary or the lack of women CEOs.
Broad numbers are tossed out: Like the fact that women make 87 cents for every dollar
that a man makes.
But through a two year and a half investigation, we’ve found that the wage gap is a symptom
of an even bigger problem.
Most people think the glass ceiling is at the top of an organization.
But it’s actually much lower than that.
Our analysis shows that by almost every measure, women are outnumbered, outranked and out-earned.
Women’s careers are stalling out at mid-level management, many rungs below the executive level.
This is the power gap between men and women.
We’ve collected hundreds of public sector salary records from institutions across the
country that shape Canadians’ lives.
These are the places that educate the next generation, build your transit, manage housing,
daycare and healthcare policy.
They sell alcohol and cannabis, regulate industry, and get hydro to your home.
The bottom line is that women are not well represented among decision makers, especially women of colour.
You can learn more about our methodology on our website.
You can filter by province to check your local city hall, your university, or different Crown
corporations and provincial ministries.
We collected our data in 2018, be fore COVID-19 devastated the economy and sent women’s
employment numbers to its lowest levels in decades.
Today, experts say the situation is likely much worse.
So let’s dig into our data:
171 organizations provided the Globe with detailed data.
Of those, 143 had more men.
117 paid men more on average. That’s over all.
One of the ways that we measured power was checking the number of men and women in different leadership positions.
At the executive level, men outnumbered women in about three quarters of the organizations.
About ten per cent of the time, the representation was equal.
To better understand where women are in each organization, we examined the gender divide
at different salary levels.
This is where you can really see the careers of women stalling out.
Take the B.C. Oil and Gas Commission, for example.
In the lowest salary band, women represent 55% of the employees.
But by the highest one, there’s only 15%
Universities showed this trend the most clearly.
In the lower salary bands, representation is pretty even. But from there the numbers
steadily drop. By the end, women represent just a fraction of top earners.
We weren’t able to capture detailed statistics on race for the entire workforce. We relied
on the gender probability of first name’s to identify men and women, and names are not
a reliable indicator of race.
We did research the background of hundreds of women in the top 1 percentile of earners.
Of everyone in this bracket just 3 per cent identified as women of colour.
If you’re wondering why we focused on the public sector it’s because we had no choice.
This is the only detailed salary data that’s available in Canada.
The experts who reviewed our findings say it’s likely much worse in the private sector.
And let's take a second to address the fact that this is a project that deals with a very
binary framing of gender, and not everyone identifies as a man or woman.
There is no question that non-binary, trans and two-spirit people face significant barriers
at work.
It just wasn't possible to measure statistically with data, but it’s an area we will absolutely
be exploring in future reporting.
In future Power Gap stories we’ll dig into how other countries are tackling this issue
and what needs to happen in Canada.
The first step is actually seeing the problem, beyond one broad statistic.
For the first time, this data allows us to drill into individual workplaces and see where
women’s careers are stalling out.
Because you can’t fix what you can’t see.