The Trouble with Pay Equity - Dr. Beth Bilson - Thurs. October 30 4 pm – 5 pm
In Celebration of Women’s History Month, the Women's Studies Research Unit is presenting a special lecture:
The Trouble with Pay Equity.
Why do efforts to close the wage gap between men and women seem to have stalled? In this presentation, Beth Bilson, chair of a federal government Task Force on Pay Equity that reported in 2004, will examine the evolution of pay equity programs in Canada, and will look, in particular, at the situation in Saskatchewan.
Thursday, October 30, 2008 4:00 p.m – 5:00 p.m.
Room 64 LAW
Everyone Welcome. Refreshments will be served
For more information, call the WSRU at 966-7524.
Related Resources:
- What is Pay Equity?
- The persistent gap: New Evidence on the Canadian Gender Wage Gap - 1999 Statistics Canada report
- Women in the Workforce: Still A Long Way from Equality - May 2008
- Final Report: Pay Equity: A New Approach to a Fundamental Right - HTML | PDF
"Some people see the issue of economic equality for women as rather outdated, out of tune with a supposed new world of opportunity that has opened up with higher education for women and a more equal division of work between women and men. Yet the fact of the matter is that, after many years of progress through the 1970s and 1980s, the gender wage gap in Canada has remained stuck since the mid 1990s at one of the highest levels in the advanced industrial world.
In 2005, the most recent year for which we have figures, women working full-time for the full year earned an average of $39,200, or 70.5% as much as comparable men who earned an average of $55,700. In the mid 1990s, such women earned 72% as much as men. The pay gap is even greater for university-educated women, who earned just 68% as much as men in 2005, down from 75% a decade ago. The gender pay gap in Canada is the fifth greatest in the advanced industrial (OECD) countries and even bigger than in the US."
-- Women in the Workforce: Still A Long Way from Equality - Canadian Labour Congress
