'Compounded over a lifetime of work, small differences add up'
Women who feel that pay is transparent at their organization earn the same amount of money as men, if not more, according to a new report from PayScale.
Women currently earn $0.80 cents for every $1 earned by a man before adjustments are made to control for non-discriminatory differences that impact compensation, it says. When compensable factors are controlled, women are still earning only $0.98 cents to $1 earned by men when doing the same job (equal pay for equal work).
But when analyzed against pay transparency, the gender wage gap completely disappears, says Payscale. Women who agreed that pay was transparent at their organization earn between $1 and $1.01 on average for every $1 a man earns, according to Does Pay Transparency Close the Gender Wage Gap?
For the report, PayScale analyzed 1.6 million survey responses on compensation collected over the last two years (September 2017 to September 2019) and compared it to previous two-year data sets going back three years to analyze historical relevance.
“A $0.02 difference may seem small, but it is statistically significant, especially when you consider that pay discrimination has been illegal since 1964. Compounded over a lifetime of work, small differences add up,” says PayScale, noting a study by the National Women’s Law Center that showed women stand to lose US$406,760 over the course of a 40-year career at the uncontrolled wage gap of US$0.80.
“Women represent 47 per cent of the total labour force,” says PayScale. “Closing the gender wage gap is important not only in the pursuit of equity and fairness, but because women represent a significant portion of the available talent in the marketplace.”
In Canada, The hourly wage gap between men and women in 2019 was still 19 per cent, according to the A Work in Progress: Measuring Wage Gaps for Women and Minorities in the Canadian Labour Market report. And it will take 99.5 years to close the gap, according to the Global Gender Gap Report 2020 report by the World Economic Forum.
