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Pay Equity Resources
Every year, we
mark Equal
Pay Day. For the past few years,
Equal Pay Day has been held around the third week in
April.
Why?
Because it takes until April for Ontario women
to earn as much as men made by December 31 of the
previous year. Women are “in the red” because on
average they earn about 30% less than men.
There is still a significant gap in earning for work
of equal value. The gap is even bigger for
racialized women, women with disabilities and
Aboriginal women.
The Goals of Equal Pay Day are:
- To raise awareness and mobilize actions so that the often hidden and illegal gender pay gap becomes a discussion topic in the media and in the workplace;
- To demand that governments and companies change their compensation and employment policies which contribute to the pay gap;
- To ensure employers have pay equity plans in place to close their pay gaps which are maintained to take account of “changed circumstances”;
- To have Equal Pay Day recognized earlier each year as the pay gap decreases and disappears.
- We need your community expertise and assistance at the local level. I am urging you to contact your municipal council to build support and declare April 9 as Equal Pay Day.
| Here is a PowerPoint presentation on the roots of the gender wage gap and two major strategies to close that gap: Click here to view or download the presentation. |
- Many people contact me to locate useful tools for maintaining their pay equity plans. I can recommend a number of sources. The Federal Government has published an excellent Guide to Pay Equity and Job Evaluation. The guide helps teams identify gender neutral practices in job evaluation. This is a very helpful tool for evaluating and creating job evaluation systems that meet the requirements of pay equity. Unfortunately, the guides have recently been removed from the website of the Canadian Human Rights Commission. However, I have posted them here: I especially recommend the first four chapters of Volume 1. You can open them in Adobe (they are PDF files) and save them to your computer.
- I have authored a manual on pay equity and employment equity for the the Public Service International (PSI). Click here to view and download the manual. The English-language version of the manual is called "Closing the Gender Wage Gap." The model job evaluation plan is NOT suitable for Canadian workplaces because of the very low weights given to Effort and Working Conditions.
- The Public Service International (PSI) recently concluded a 10-year world-wide campaign on pay equity and employment equity. Some excellent resources were produced. However, since the PSI's site was re-designed, information about the Pay Equity Now! campaign is no longer available. But keep looking. You can find the site of the PSI by clicking here. More information is finding its way back onto the site.
- The Ontario Pay Equity Commission has a list of downloadable publications on its website. Although the Commission no longer provides its free model JE systems on the site, there are guidelines on maintenance and pay equity in "proxy" workplaces (establishments with few or no male job classes for female job classes to compare to). Click here for a list of resources.
Above: Members of the Ontario Equal Pay Coalition
pass out campaign materials in downtown Toronto,
February 2008
- The Equal Pay Coalition, based in Ontario, has re-developed its website, with loads of resources. Click here to explore that site (equalpaycoalition.org)
- The International
Labour Organization (ILO) has published a
very helpful guide to pay equity job evaluation,
written by a pay equity expert from Quebec,
Marie-Thérèse Chicha.
Promoting equity: Gender-neutral job evaluation for
equal pay. A step-by-step guide.
Click here for the PDF version of the document from the ILO publications site.
The ILO document is also available in Spanish and French.