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Fifty years after Canada ratified the International Labour Organization (ILO) resolution 100 on equal pay for work of equal value, women are still waiting for economic justice.

Canada’s gender pay gap

While the gender pay gap has narrowed over the decades, notably in the last few years, it remains unacceptably wide: a woman needed to work an additional 73 days—until the middle of April—to catch up to what the average man earned in 2025. This works out to an overall gender gap in annual earnings of 28 per cent.

In dollar terms, women are making more than $19,000 less a year, on average, than men—an astronomical $200 billion collectively in lost wages.

The unequal division of care labour continues to constrain women’s employment opportunities and lifetime earnings. One recent Canadian study found mothers’ earnings fall by an average of 49 per cent after the birth of the first child.

The gender pay gap is wider as well for women confronting intersecting sources of discrimination. Black and Indigenous women workers, for example, make close to 40 per cent less than non-racialized, non-Indigenous male workers per year.

Canada’s glacial progress in reducing gender wage disparities speaks to the scale of the challenge involved in rooting out intersectional gender discrimination within a context of increasing income and wealth polarization.

The robust employment recovery in 2021 and 2022 boosted women’s wages, including those from historically marginalized groups, but it did not fundamentally change the bifurcated character of Canada’s labour market. Women and marginalized workers have found themselves on both sides of Canada’s two-track recovery complicating efforts to close the gender pay gap.

These challenges are made more difficult in the context of the attack on workers’ rights, the growing precarity of work arrangements, privatization of public services and public sector cutbacks, and the growing number of vulnerable migrant and undocumented workers subject to exploitation and abuse.

Swimming upstream: The evolution of pay equity in Canada

Continued progress in closing the gender pay gap is far from assured. Attention must be paid to protecting hard-won gains as well as to finding new opportunities for progress. Expanding and enforcing proactive pay equity legislation that directly targets the devaluation of women’s work and the standing of low-waged workers in female-dominated occupations and industries is one essential tool in this task.

Canada was an early leader in introducing pay equity laws. Proactive pay equity regimes now vary substantially among Canadian jurisdictions in the degree to which they have embraced best practices and prioritized pay equity.

There is much still to do to strengthen existing legislation and policy, starting with expanding access to best-in-class proactive pay equity in the provinces and territories that do not have any system in place, namely Alberta, Saskatchewan, British Columbia and the three territories.

Another group of jurisdictions—Manitoba, Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Newfoundland and Labrador—need to take immediate action to expand and enhance their existing provisions to cover a broader range of workers in the para-public and private sectors.

And all governments—including Quebec, Ontario and the federal government with the most developed systems—need to take steps to strengthen provisions for accountability, transparency and enforcement and to explore avenues for expanding access to casual, part-time and temporary workers and incorporating methods that can assess and respond to intersectional gender discrimination.

Learning the lessons of pay equity

Economist Marie-Thérèse Chicha makes the point that “Pay equity policies are as much a matter of process—removal of discriminatory obstacles, e.g. gender biased job evaluation and remuneration systems—as of the final results: achieving equal pay for work of equal value.” In other words, effective pay equity is all about the details.

To this end:

  • Pay equity legislation should clearly establish the obligation of employers to achieve and maintain pay equity through the development of proactive pay equity plans, setting out clear objectives and definitions.
  • It must require rigorous gender-neutral job evaluation methods that ensure women’s work is assessed on the same basis as their male peers. Where no male comparators exist within an organization or firm, access to a proxy method or comparable process must be established.
  • It should also promote collaboration between all stakeholders, guaranteeing that employees and their representatives have meaningful roles in decision-making
  • It should likewise set strong standards of accountability and transparency via regular public and workplace reporting and mandatory equal pay audits such as exists in Quebec designed to root out gender-biased pay practices.
  • The success of these efforts rests with well-resourced oversight bodies, providing needed education and support to stakeholders, and serving as the avenue for investigating complaints, settling disputes, and issuing compliance orders. As the history of pay equity and all employment law illustrates, the absence of deterrence incentivizes non-compliance.

Closing the gender pay gap requires a comprehensive strategy

All the literature on proactive pay equity stresses that comprehensive pay equity laws are essential in the fight to reduce the gender wage gap and the impact of historical discrimination, but there are limits to what it can achieve.

Policies to reduce gender pay equality need to be developed in tandem with policies to reduce wage inequality overall, as well as those that address the other forms of gendered discrimination in the labour market and penalties attached to motherhood and caregiving.

Likewise, access to high-quality community supports such as child care and attendant care—tailored to the diverse realities of women and their families—is also a fundamental plank in the multi-pronged strategy needed to close the gender wage gap. Improving the wages and the working conditions of the workers in these jobs, in turn, is another assured strategy to the same end.

So, too, is the presence of unions. Trade unions not only play a pivotal role in the development and implementation of proactive pay equity plans, but also through the negotiation of collective agreements that deliver, for example, fair scheduling, pro-rated benefits, professional development and strong protections against discrimination and harassment

Initiatives to expand union coverage, especially in the private sector, where the unionization rate hovers near 15 per cent and an even lower 12 per cent among women, are one of the most important strategies for expanding the reach and impact of pay equity across the country.

Looking forward

It’s been 75 years since the ILO resolution 100 on equal pay for work of equal value was adopted, and more than 50 years since it was ratified in Canada. Yet there’s still a long way to go to realize economic justice for women and others fighting for decent wages and good jobs. The fight for pay equity offers many lessons for advancing women’s rights and gender equality. The imperative now is to apply these lessons in service of a more resilient and inclusive labour market and gender-just future.

About the author

Katherine Scott

Katherine serves as the director for the CCPA’s gender equality and public policy work. She has worked in the community sector as a researcher, writer and advocate over the past 20 years, writing on a range of issues from social policy to inequality to funding for nonprofits.