Men are being paid more than women in every occupational category within Ontario\u2019s retail sector, new Brock University-led research reveals.<\/p>\n
This is despite the fact that most of Ontario\u2019s one million retail workers are women. And, the sector\u2019s few full-time positions are disproportionately given to men.<\/p>\n
These are among the stark findings of the report, \u201cThe Gender Wage Gap in Ontario\u2019s Retail Sector: Devaluing Women\u2019s Work and Women Workers.<\/a>\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019ve studied retail work for six years, but the seriousness of the pay inequities in Ontario still surprised and angered me,\u201d says Brock University labour expert Kendra Coulter, the report\u2019s lead author.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is not about a few bad apples: there is a widespread devaluing of women workers across the sector,\u201d says Coulter, Associate Professor in Brock\u2019s Centre for Labour Studies.<\/p>\n Coulter teamed up with Angella MacEwen, an economist at the Canadian Labour Congress, and Sheetal Rawal, a lawyer with expertise in pay equity issues, to produce the April 18 report.<\/p>\n With a grant from the Ontario Pay Equity Commission, the team gathered data on the \u201cgender wage gap,\u201d the difference between what women and men are paid.<\/p>\n In Ontario, for every dollar a male worker earns, a woman worker earns 74 cents. Put another way, April 19 is the date that a woman has to work to in order to earn as much as a man was paid \u2013 the year before.<\/p>\n One factor influencing this gender pay gap is that \u201cwomen are disproportionately represented in low-paying, largely non-unionized sectors like retail,\u201d says Coulter.<\/p>\n But major gender inequities exist even within the retail sector, says the report. Examples include:<\/p>\n\n