Study: Gender pay gaps among board directors and officers in Canada, 2016 to 2020

Released: 2024-10-15

Despite decades of gains in the workplace, women continue to be underrepresented in leadership and decision-making positions.

A new Statistics Canada study released today, titled "Gender pay gaps among board directors and officers in Canada," explores two possible sources of these gaps: the base pay and the variable pay. This study investigates the effect of some socioeconomic and firm characteristics on gender pay gaps among executives in Canada.

Additional information related to gender and corporations can be found in the Gender, Diversity and Inclusion Statistics Hub, the Business Performance and Ownership Statistics portal and the ''Representation of women on boards of directors and in officer positions: Visualization tool.''

Also released today is "Gender pay gaps among executives in Canada," an infographic that provides an overview of the study's key findings.

Women executives have a lower compensation package than men executives

From 2016 to 2020, executives worked in 9,760 enterprises. Among these enterprises, 3,730 (38.2%) had at least one woman occupying an executive role, compared with 8,780 enterprises (61.7%) that had at least one man working as an executive. In terms of total compensation, women executives earned, on average, 40.6% less than men executives when not controlling for other factors.

Women executives are younger and less likely to be married, to have at least one child and to occupy a top-level position compared with men executives

From 2016 to 2020, women executives were aged 50 years, on average, while men executives were aged 52 years, on average. Women executives were less likely to be married (71.2%) and to have at least one child (37.9%) than men executives (83.8% were married and 39.8% had at least one child). The position of vice-president was the most predominant role held by both women officers (24.8%) and men officers (29.6%). Conversely, women were more likely to occupy lower-level positions. For example, women officers were 2.3 times more likely to work as a secretary than men officers and 3.0 times more likely to be an assistant secretary.

Gender pay gaps persist among executives after controlling for socioeconomic and firm characteristics

After accounting for socioeconomic and firm characteristics, the average gender pay gap for 2016 to 2020 was estimated at 32.1% for total compensation and 29.5% for base pay. The occupational titles of women executives and men executives explained the largest portion of the reduction in the raw gender pay gap. In fact, the proportion of the gap explained by occupational titles was similar across all compensation types, varying from 26.9% to 28.6%. This suggests that the disparity in compensation between genders was partly attributable to occupational segregation. With pronounced compensation differences existing across various occupational titles, there being a higher proportion of women executives in lower-paying roles impacted their base pay downward.

Products

The study, "Gender pay gaps among board directors and officers in Canada" is now available as part of the series Analysis in Brief (Catalogue number11-621-M).

Also released today is an infographic titled "Gender pay gaps among executives in Canada" available as part of the series Statistics Canada – Infographics (Catalogue number11-627-M).

Contact information

For more information, or to enquire about the concepts, methods or data quality of this release, contact us (toll-free 1-800-263-1136; 514-283-8300; infostats@statcan.gc.ca) or Media Relations (statcan.mediahotline-ligneinfomedias.statcan@statcan.gc.ca).