In downtown Toronto, at a busy marketing firm, two employees join the same creative meeting: a woman and a man, both in their early thirties, both with master’s degrees in communications. Yet when they compare salaries afterward, the man learns he is earning about ten percent more. The discovery is uncomfortable, but not unusual. Across Canada, the gender wage gap remains a stubborn feature of working life, narrowing with each decade, yet still large enough to shape careers, family choices, and the economy at large.
How wide is the gap?
The answer depends on how one measures it. If you take median hourly wages across all workers, women earned about 84 cents for every dollar earned by men in 2022. Narrow the scope to full-time workers, and the gap shrinks: in 2024, women in full-time jobs earned about 89 cents on the male dollar. Even when statisticians account for age, education, occupation, and hours, an unexplained gap persists; women still make roughly 8.5 percent less than men. That lingering disparity suggests something deeper than choice alone.
Progress is real, but slow. In 2007, women aged 20 to 54 faced a 16 percent wage gap; by 2022 it had fallen to 12 percent. Canadian-born women now earn about nine percent less than Canadian-born men, down from fifteen percent a decade and a half ago. Yet immigrant women who arrived as adults continue to face gaps above twenty percent, and Indigenous women trail Canadian-born men by a similar margin. Geography matters too: in provinces like British Columbia and Alberta, women’s earnings fall as much as 15 to 17 percent short of men’s, while Prince Edward Island reports a narrower divide. The numbers shift depending on the lens, but the story remains the same: pay inequality is embedded in the fabric of Canadian work.
A structural gap with real consequences
The reasons are well known. Women are more likely to be clustered in lower-paying occupations such as education, healthcare, and services, while still underrepresented in high-earning fields like engineering, finance, and technology. Many work part-time or step away from the labor force for caregiving, slowing career trajectories. Promotions and leadership opportunities often arrive later, if at all. Even within the same jobs, disparities persist, hinting at bias in evaluation, negotiation, or reward. And the gap tends to widen at the top: women who break into executive or high-income roles often discover the gulf is greater, not smaller.
The economic consequences are enormous. A gap of ten to fifteen percent may sound modest, but stretched across a career it translates into hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost wages, thinner retirement accounts, and lower lifetime wealth. At the national level, Ottawa estimates that closing the gender pay gap could add as much as $150 billion to Canada’s GDP within a few years. Inequality is not only unfair; it is inefficient.
How staffing firms can help close the gap
Closing the gap requires effort from every side. Governments have moved forward with pay transparency laws, such as British Columbia’s new requirement that job postings include salary ranges and employers report wage gaps. Stronger pay equity enforcement and better childcare supports could help reduce the penalty of taking parental leave. But the state cannot do it alone. Employers must do more to standardize pay frameworks, conduct regular audits, and make compensation structures visible. Without transparency, inequities remain hidden.
Staffing firms, often overlooked in this debate, have a unique role to play. As the intermediaries between candidates and employers, they can demand transparency from clients, present diverse shortlists of candidates, and push for equitable pay packages. They can advise companies on best practices, benchmark salaries across industries, and even use their influence to favor firms that treat workers fairly. In many ways, staffing firms are market makers. If they normalize pay equity, they can nudge entire industries toward better standards.
The Canadian wage gap has been shrinking for decades, but its persistence shows that cultural habits and institutional inertia are hard to break. For a woman in the workforce today, the promise of parity is still out of reach. Yet the tools to close the gap are available: stronger laws, bolder corporate leadership, and staffing firms that use their leverage to demand fairness. The question is whether Canada will have the urgency to use them.
In a just labor market, two equally qualified workers sitting in the same meeting should never find themselves separated by a paycheque gap. That ideal remains unfinished business.