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Toronto
June 18, 2007
Article Source: Toronto Star
More young women are getting a university degree, which generally translates into a higher income, but they're having a hard time closing the wage gap with men, reports the Toronto Star.
A Statistics Canada study released recently found university educated women in their 20s earned 18 per cent less than men from 1991 to 2001. This was only slightly better than in 1991, when women earned 20 per cent less than men. This gap narrowed only slightly despite the sharp increase in the proportion of young women with university degrees. From 1991 to 2001, the proportion of 25- to 29-year-old women holding university degrees rose to 34 per cent, from 21 per cent. The proportion of men with degrees in the same age group rose only moderately, to 21 per cent from 16 per cent.
The study's authors, Marc Frenette and Simon Coulombe, say that although the statistics were based on data going back to 2001, the latest evidence shows the gap is closing further in favour of women.
"There are signs that indicate the gender wage gap has been declining further and at a faster pace from 2000 to 2005," said Frenette. Others agree.Wendy Cukier, founder of the Diversity Institute in Management and Technology, a research centre that looks at diversity and gender issues in the workplace, says women have been making strides since the Statistics Canada data have been analyzed."I think we're moving in the right direction," Cukier said. The reason the wage gap hasn't narrowed further may be that women are still choosing professions hit by wage declines, such as in education and health care, the study's authors say.
Meanwhile, men continue to choose professions such as commerce, computer sciences and engineering that have enjoyed wage gains.
For example, the authors say, 18.4 per cent of young men with a university degree had specialized in engineering in the 2001 study, compared to 4.3 per cent of women. "Women are far more likely to study health and education, two largely public-sector careers that saw substantial wage freezes and rollbacks in the 1990s," they say."On the other hand, men are more likely to study engineering and other technology fields, which proved to be a lucrative choice during the high-tech boom of the late 1990s."
The authors theorized that "perhaps women are deterred from entering male-dominated fields of study because of social norms and customs." However, there is evidence that with the bust of the dot-com boom and recent wage settlements made by educators, the next study will show the wage gap is closing further."Since the turn of the century, things have actually reversed," Frenette said in an interview."The high-tech sector has actually gone through a meltdown, whereas the public sector has had more favourable wage settlements."The Statistics Canada study didn't surprise other experts in the field of diversity. John Kervin, a sociology professor at the University of Toronto who studies the sociology of work, didn't find the results out of whack.
"Women have come a long way with pay equity laws, but what we don't have is employment equity, which is men and women going into the same jobs in the same proportions," he said, noting other countries also have issues regarding "occupational segregation."
"We're certainly educating women, but the question is what are they doing with that education?" he said. Cukier, the Diversity Institute founder and also associate dean of the Ted Rogers School of Management at Toronto's Ryerson University, said although "overt" acts of discrimination were addressed in the 1980s and 1990s, there are still barriers – at individual, organizational and societal levels – that are "less obvious." Those "systemic barriers" include stereotypes of women, their own self-confidence and assertiveness and the "informal network" whereby promotions are made mostly among men. "Often things are done at the golf course or at the hockey games," Cukier said. "There is research that shows a lot of the barriers we see are less visible than the real overt forms of discrimination."
Forward-thinking organizations are beginning now to "try to grapple with these barriers," Cukier said.
Website: http://www.thestar.com/Business/article/224615
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