Aligning pay with value of work fundamental to retention, recruitment, maximizing skills: experts

Progress on pay equity is real, but slow and profoundly uneven. That’s the message from the Ontario Pay Equity Office, which reports that, on an hourly basis, women in Ontario earned 88 cents for every dollar earned by men in 2025, leaving a 12 per cent wage gap — a slight improvement from 82 cents nearly three decades ago.

However, when average annual earnings are considered — capturing bonuses, commissions and differences in hours worked — the gap widens sharply: Ontario women earned 72 cents on the dollar in 2023, a 28-per-cent gap, according to Statistics Canada. The latter figure is an improvement from 62 cents 30 years ago.

Ontario’s wage gap is identical to Canada’s at 12 per cent, while provincially, it ranges from 18 per cent in Alberta to five per cent in New Brunswick — with Prince Edward Island the only province with women earning more than men, by four per cent.

For Katherine Scott, a senior researcher at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, the current moment sits on top of decades of ongoing work.

“Pay equity has been a long slog in Canada, as it's been 75 years since the 1951 ILO Convention brought the principle of pay equity into human rights legislation,” says Scott.

That history matters for HR leaders because it underscores how often organizations have treated pay equity as a legal obligation to be managed rather than as a core design issue in how...

Read Full Story: https://news.google.com/rss/articles/CBMiwwFBVV95cUxQdF8wMzVFYUluZTJMUkZWS2Ny...