“President Barack Obama officially declared Tuesday “National Equal Pay Day,” symbolically marking how much extra work women supposedly must perform to reach pay parity with men.

“Women — who make up nearly half of our nation’s workforce — face a pay gap that means they earn 23 percent less on average than men do. That disparity is even greater for African-American women and Latinas,” Obama said in a statement issued Monday. “On National Equal Pay Day, we recognize this injustice by marking how far into the new year women have to work just to make what men did in the previous one.””*

According to Pay Equity Commission in Ontario: “The gender wage gap is the difference between wages earned by men and wages earned by women. The gap can be measured in various ways, but the most common method is to look at full–time, full year wages. It is also possible to measure the gender wage gap on the basis of hourly wages. The most recent Statistics Canada data shows that the gender wage gap in Ontario is 28% for full–time, full–year workers. This means that for every $1.00 earned by a male worker, a female worker earns 72 cents. In 1987, when the Pay Equity Act was passed, the gender wage gap was 36%. The gender wage gap has been narrowing slowly over time. Statisticians estimate that as much as 10 to 15 % of the gender wage gap is due to discrimination.”**

As to British Columbia, “All University of British Columbia all full-time, female-identified tenure and tenure-track professors are getting a raise to counteract gendered pay inequity. The two per cent salary increase, retroactive to July 1, 2010, is part of a three-year process between the University of British Columbia (UBC) and the UBC Faculty Association (UBCFA) to solve pay inequity among full-time tenure-track faculty. The study did not look at pay inequity among UBC academic or administrative support staff. Inspired by pay equity reports in 2007 and 2009 from UBC’s Equity Office, the University and UBCFA created two separate working groups: the DATA Working Group for collecting data on pay equity and the SMART Working Group to devise solutions.”***

*Source: Daily Caller. Full article

** Source: Pay Equity Commission Ontario. Full article

*** Source: The Thyee. Full article