Public sector salaries: Where are the women? In B.C., not many are near the top of the pay scale
Credit to Author: Lori Culbert| Date: Fri, 31 Jan 2020 21:52:36 +0000
B.C.’s public sector — a massive group of employees paid with your tax dollars — has roughly the same number of female and male workers, but that is where the equality ends.
Three-quarters of women paid by the public purse are in the lowest salary bracket we analyzed, while men are massively overrepresented in the higher pay scales, according to The Vancouver Sun’s newest version of its popular public sector salaries database.
“The results of that data analysis are consistent with a lot of studies of the gender wage gap: The higher you get into the salary range, the bigger the gap,” said Jennifer Berdahl, a UBC sociology professor whose expertise includes diversity, equity and gender.
Academic research shows evidence of women being paid less than men “even when we see similar skills and equal education required,” she added.
The Sun collected salary data on nearly 90,000 workers who make at least $75,000 annually from approximately 100 public sector employers, including the provincial government, municipalities, universities and colleges, school boards, municipal police forces, Crown corporations and health regions.
For the 10th time since 2007, The Sun has produced a searchable database containing the names, titles, workplaces and remuneration of these public employees.
Note to users:The search function in this Caspio database is not supported in Safari browsers —including the Sun and Province apps, which are built on Safari — on mobile phones. Please try your Chrome or Firefox browser if you’re unable to search.
What’s different this year, though, is we paid to determine the gender breakdown of these workers by submitting their first names to Gender-API.com. Results with less than a 95 per cent confidence score from the API were excluded from the analysis, so of the nearly 90,000 names in the database, we have reliable gender information for two-thirds of them.
The good news is that just over half of these employees are women, meaning the overall public workforce is balanced along gender lines.
The teeter-totter dips heavily toward men, though, when remuneration is divided into pay-scale brackets.
• More than three-quarters of women included in our database were in the lowest salary bin, making between $75,000 and $100,000, compared to 60 per cent of men. (The Sun did not request salary data for workers who make below $75,000.)
• Men dominated the next category, $100,000 to $150,000 — 30 per cent of male workers in our database received this higher wage, compared to just 20 per cent of females.
• The gulf widened further for all salaries over $150,000, with twice as many men than women raking in this hefty amount of cash. Nine per cent of the men in our database were in this wage range, compared to just four per cent of women.
• The most extreme inequity came when we examined the 50 highest paid public sector workers, who make between $500,000 and $3 million annually. For this group, we manually confirmed the gender of the employees, and found only six of the 50 (or 12 per cent) were women.
The four women with the biggest paycheques all hold senior positions with B.C. Investment Management Corporation, which invests money for public sector pension plans. The other two spots held by women are CEO of the B.C. Securities Commission and the head of nuclear medicine at the Provincial Health Services Authority.
The investment managers and senior administrators at the Investment Management Corporation routinely dominate the highest echelon of public sector salaries, and this year hold 35 of the 50 most lucrative positions. Its CEO, Gordon Fyfe, rakes in the most public sector cash, at $3 million a year.
Rounding out the top 50 list — comprised of 44 men and six women — are six UBC employees, four from the Provincial Health Services Authority, three from B.C. Hydro subsidiary Powerex Corporation, and two from the Securities Commission. Most command high salaries because of the expertise they bring to these jobs, the corporations say.
When people think of the salaries funded through the taxes they pay, they often think of politicians. But the people we elect are far down the list of high-income earners in the public sector. In 2018, there were 3,770 public sector employees who made more money than Premier John Horgan, whose remuneration was reported by the province to be $172,000 (not including his $53,300 in expenses).
Premier John Horgan looks on as Anne Kang, Minister of Citizen’s Services, is sworn in by Lt.-Gov. Janet Austin in January.
In our analysis, remuneration includes salary, overtime, bonuses and other one-time payouts or benefits, such as unused vacation time. It does not include expenses.
The analysis was based on employment data from 2018 or the 2017-18 fiscal year, depending on how each agency reports its finances. Some of the names and positions in the database may be out of date if someone retired or moved jobs in 2019, but the analysis provides a recent snapshot in time of public sector payrolls in B.C.
Today, we launch a weeklong series that breaks down the gender gap in different areas of the public sector.
Among our findings:
• Of the highest-paid 25 people employed by the provincial government, a category dominated by lawyers and deputy ministers, only six are women.
• Just 17 of the top 100 university earners are women.
• Among municipal governments in Metro Vancouver, which employ many garbage collectors, firefighters and street crews, 80 per cent of all employees who make more than $75,000 are men, and just 20 per cent are women.
B.C. is one of only four provinces without pay equity legislation to require employers to give equal pay to women and men for equal work. B.C. and two of the other provinces without this type of law (Alberta and Saskatchewan) have the three largest gaps in gender pay, according to Statistics Canada.
In response to questions from The Sun, the provincial government said legislation was only one way to address inequity. Instead, the NDP government said the “best way to help the most women” was through steps it has recently taken, such as expanding child care, investing in housing for women escaping violence, raising the minimum wage and liquor server wages, and giving extra support to women in skilled trades training.
“People deserve to be paid fairly and have equal opportunities to succeed. That’s why we’re focused on removing systemic barriers to pay equity,” Mitzi Dean, parliamentary secretary for gender equity, said in a statement. “Affordable, universal child care is the single most impactful way to close the pay gap. However we know there’s more to do and we are actively working on levelling the playing field.”
The government also launched a diversity plan in October 2017 that aims to hire more women, visible minorities, First Nations, people with disabilities and LGBTQ2S+ people. The government “recognize(s) the importance of ongoing recruitment and outreach to under-represented equity groups,” said the statement from Dean’s office.
Mitzi Dean, parliamentary secretary for gender equality, at the Saa-ust Centre in Vancouver in 2018.
The Sun’s gender-pay-gap findings echo other reports, such as one from Statistics Canada last October that found women in B.C. earn, on average, almost 20 per cent less an hour than men — and B.C. had the largest gulf between male and female salaries of all the provinces.
Nationally, the gender pay gap is much lower than B.C.’s at 13.3 per cent less an hour. Put a different way, women make $4.13 less an hour, on average, than their male counterparts in Canada.
There has been gradual improvement across the country, StatsCan found, since 1998 when the national gender pay gap was nearly 19 per cent. These gains were due, in part, to women pursuing more education and securing a larger share of unionized positions.
But more work still needs to be done to address some of the long-standing factors behind why women continue to make less money than men. This includes the unequal distribution of women and men across some industries, and women’s overrepresentation in part-time work, StatsCan says.
“We are not where we should be,” a Vancity wealth adviser, Sophie Salcito, said about the credit union’s report, Troubled Money, on the financial challenges facing women.
The report noted the World Economic Forum’s 2017 Global Gender Gap Index — which measures salary, education and employment for women — ranked Canada 14th out of 144 countries a decade ago. But in 2017, Canada dropped to 16th place, suggesting we are going backwards when it comes to closing the gender pay gap.
Part of the reason is that the 20 poorest-paid occupations continue to be overwhelmingly occupied by women. “These include the so-called 5 C’s jobs: caring, cleaning, catering, cashiering and clerical,” the Vancity report found.
This disparity is even more emphasized in B.C., especially in Vancouver, which is often ranked as one of the most expensive cities in the world. A B.C. woman’s average annual salary of $34,349 was 35 per cent lower than the average salary of men who live here — and was the fourth lowest wage of all the provinces.
Vancity’s report also found the employment rate for women in B.C. is below the national average, despite a strong economy and a labour shortage.
The challenge to find affordable child care in this province likely explains part of that statistic, Salcito said, along with other realities facing GenXers like her: The unpaid work they often do at home looking after both children and aging relatives.
Vancity wealth adviser Sophie Salcito, who works with many female clients, at a branch in North Vancouver.
“We want to get people who can work, who have skills, back in the workforce. So if you are hindered because of child care, for example, that’s why the government needs to find a solution. If we have an astro-scientist sitting at home because she, for whatever reasons, can’t work, it is about trying to clear the path for that,” Salcito said.
“Having more equitable female participation, we need it because it is good for the country. We will add millions of dollars of GDP down the road.“
The federal Liberal government deserves credit, she said, for some recent steps, which include money for new parental supports, anti-harassment programs, and pay equity legislation in federally regulated workplaces.
The federal law does not cover private companies, where the bulk of employment occurs in Canada. “Definitely the private sector can do better, and we need to find better strategies for that,” added Salcito.
Indeed, 50 B.C. private corporations were analyzed by Minerva, a Vancouver non-profit that runs leadership programs for women, and were found to employ women in only one out of every five board positions or executive roles.
“Very little in the leadership landscape has changed in the past 10 years and at the current rate, it will be another 170 years before women can expect professional parity,” Minerva says on the front page of its website, quoting research from the World Economic Forum.
Within the public sector in B.C., women now hold nearly 50 per cent of board seats, up from 41 per cent in 2017. Although that is a move in the right direction, The Sun’s analysis shows the public sector still has much work to do to reach parity among all public sector workers.
The reason for the gender imbalance is not a lack of education among women, research has shown. In fact, Canadian women today hold more degrees than men.
A 2017 Cornell University study found nearly half of the gender pay gap discrepancy could be explained by factors such as region, occupation, ethnicity, experience or education, said Berdahl, the UBC professor. The unexplained half appears to boil down to one thing: gender.
For example, there continues to be discrimination against mothers when it comes to both wages and employment, due to factors such as maternity leaves and balancing paid work with responsibilities at home.
UBC sociology Prof Jennifer Berdahl, who has an expertise in diversity, equity, gender and women’s studies.
“There is also a growing premium on work hours. So, to the extent that employees can work 24/7, that gets rewarded more now than it used to. And so men are more likely to do that than women,” Berdahl said.
So what to do about the continuing gender wage gap?
The Vancity report makes some recommendations, which include employers examining remuneration policies to ensure they are unbiased and governments continuing to improve access to child care.
Other solutions, said Berdahl, include desegregating the workforce by opening more traditionally male roles, such as blue collar jobs, up to women; following the lead of Quebec, which offers paternity leave to all fathers, thereby reducing the stigma of mothers who take leaves; and starting at young grades to encourage girls to pursue education in male-dominated fields, such as engineering.
“The segregation of the labour market starts in the third grade, so you have to back up to how we are teaching subjects in the classrooms,” Berdahl said.
“We are still socializing our kids in very gender binary terms. And it’s no surprise that that sorts them into different roles in the labour market and in the home, and that both of those things create this pretty wide gap between what they earn.”
The database includes pay for more than 88,800 public servants working at over 100 public sector agencies, including the provincial government, Crown corporations, health authorities, municipalities, universities and colleges, school districts and municipal police departments. The data were gathered from publicly available compensation disclosure reports and freedom of information requests.
Remuneration information includes base salary, overtime, vacation payouts and severance.
Depending on how an agency reports financial data, information is from either the 2017-18 fiscal year or the 2018 calendar year.
You can search the database at: vancouversun.com/salaries
Saturday — Part 1: The gender wage gap
Monday — Part 2: The provincial government
Tuesday — Part 3: Municipal governments
Wednesday — Part 4: Universities and colleges
Thursday — Part 5: School boards
Friday — Part 6: Crown corporations