Examining gender gaps in the workplace is notoriously difficult, in large part because of lack of reliable data. But there might be a way to get around that. Every year, the Canadian province of Ontario preleases a list of all public employees who make more than $100,000 per year. This alone is not enough to investigate differences in salary between men and women. But if we combine this with a dataset of the most common male and female names in Canada, then we can assign each person in the Ontario dataset a gender.
Do women earn less than men? That's the question that comes to everyone's mind when thinking about gender discrimination. After adjusting for the number of years of experience (and for purchasing power over time), we find that there's no meaningful difference in salaries between men and women.
Pure salary is not the full story. Even if women seemingly earn as much as men, the composition of men and women is not consistent. Namely, the more years of experienced a worker is, the more likely they are to be a man.
This analysis is still in very early phases, and there are still many things to consider and account for.
- One glaring problem is that the salaries we examine here are for workers in the public sector. The gender dynamics could be completely different in the rpivate sector.
- Gender discrmination is much more complex than just "Who earns more money?". This analysis just scratches the surface of the issue. I'm sure a socioeconomist would have a lot more to say in the matter.
In one sentence: women earn the same as men for the same experience level, however women tend to have less experience than men.