Public Sector Salaries: Only 20 per cent of municipal employees in our database are women
Credit to Author: Lori Culbert| Date: Tue, 04 Feb 2020 00:10:51 +0000
Eighty per cent of higher-income employees working for local governments in the Lower Mainland are men, and just 20 per cent are women — one of the largest gender gaps in B.C.’s public sector, according to Postmedia’s new searchable database.
At Metro Vancouver, TransLink and 18 Lower Mainland city halls, there are nearly 9,000 employees who make more than $75,000 annually, but there is a shocking gender divide: 7,150 of these employees are men, while only 1,800 are women.
There are 800 men and just 300 women at Metro Vancouver who make more than $75,000, the data shows. Many of the region’s key jobs, in engineering, operations and maintenance, have traditionally been male-dominated.
“This has impacted the overall labour pool and availability of diverse talent. We recognize this as a gap and are actively striving to ensure our outreach, recruitment efforts and processes attract a diverse candidate pool that is reflective of our region,” said Metro Vancouver spokeswoman Sarah Lusk.
Metro is working with post-secondary schools and associations to try to create a wider pool of candidates for the future, Lusk said, and added the region’s executive team and engineer-in-training program are both gender-balanced now.
Postmedia collected salary data on nearly 90,000 public-sector workers who make at least $75,000 annually from approximately 100 public-sector employers, including the provincial government, city halls and universities. With this data, Postmedia produced a searchable database containing the names, titles, work places and remuneration of these public employees.
To look at the gender breakdown of the local government workers in the database, we submitted 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, providing us with reliable gender results for about 82 per cent — or nearly 9,000 workers.
Several Lower Mainland cities, including Vancouver and Coquitlam, were not included in our gender analysis because they provided just first initials (instead of first names) in their data.
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.
Postmedia manually determined the gender of the 25 highest-paid people at Vancouver City Hall, and found an equal distribution with 13 women and 12 men.
Vancouver’s human resources director, Simon Goldsmith, said one-third of the city’s entire staff (not just those making more than $75,000) identify as women. He noted many of the city’s operational roles, such as construction, street work, sanitation, building maintenance and firefighting, have traditionally been male-dominated, but the city’s equity strategy includes “numerous steps to address the under-representation of women in these areas.”
Surrey did not answer questions about why the data shows it employs 700 men who make more than $75,000 but only 185 women, but human resources director Joey Brar said, “The city has a human rights policy that ensures all hiring is merit-based and that discrimination based on gender is strictly prohibited.” He noted Surrey received an award in 2019 for being one of Canada’s best “diversity employers.”
Of the 25 highest-earning local government workers in the database (which was for 2018, or the fiscal year 2017-18), only seven are women — including now-retired Metro Vancouver Chief Administrative Officer Carol Mason in the top spot with a salary of $458,443.
Metro Vancouver chief administrative officer Carol Mason. (Submitted/Metro Vancouver)
After Mason, the highest salaries (ranging from $359,000 to $450,000) belonged to TransLink’s CEO, Surrey’s city manager, TransLink’s president, and Richmond’s fleet manager.
Richmond, Metro’s fourth-largest city, paid three of the seven most expensive salaries in the top-25 list for its fleet manager, CAO, and public works director. City spokesman Clay Adams said two of those salaries were high because of lump-sum payments for unused vacation and banked leave.
Postmedia’s data shows only a quarter of Richmond’s city staff who make more than $75,000 are women, but Adams said 42 per cent of the overall workforce is female — a number that he said has increased since 2010.
TransLink did not respond to questions from Postmedia, but last year approved an executive compensation plan that increases pay ranges for executives.
Simon Fraser University politics professor Genevieve Fuji Johnson suggested all public-sector agencies should do equity audits for gender and race that are cross-referenced with seniority levels and salary ranges. That aggregate data should be made public so people can better understand the demographics of their workforces, she said.
“These are basic expectations we can have with respect to all of our public bodies, as well as, quite frankly, our corporations,” said Johnson, whose research includes gender and racialized demographics of governance positions in Canadian universities, in an effort to identify barriers to women of colour.
“And I think we can expect more from our municipal governments, as a starting point. Local governments are super important, and they are making decisions that immediately affect us.”
Simon Fraser University politics Professor Genevieve Fuji Johnson.Source: SFU
Women’s participation in historically male-dominated, higher-paying careers is improving, but the gap still persists. There could be a wide variety of reasons for this, Johnson said, but among them are unpaid work expectations — such as child-rearing and care-giving — that may affect how much work a woman can take on.
“Why this is happening, on the one hand, is very complex. On the other hand, there are lots of arrows pointing at gendered expectations, gender stereotypes, and gender bias as well,” she said.
“It is the responsibility of our elected officials anywhere to address issues of discrimination and to be taking seriously representational gaps as well as pay gaps.”
Twitter: @loriculbert
The Public Sector Salaries Database
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 was 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
Our Series
Day 1: The Gender Wage Gap
Day 2: The Provincial Government
Day 3: Municipal Governments
Day 4: Universities and Colleges
Day 5: School Boards
Day 6: Crown Corporations