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Canadian Press
Tara Deschamps
Published June 20, 2024 • 3 min read
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A new study finds that the gender pay gap in Canada's technology industry nearly tripled between 2016 and 2021. In this June 11, 2019 photo, a man walks through an office building in downtown Toronto with other buildings reflected in the window. Photo by Graham Roy/The Canadian Press
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TORONTO — A new report says the gender pay gap in Canada's tech industry nearly tripled between 2016 and 2021, with women earning an average salary of about $20,000 less than men in the industry.
The report, titled “Canada's Tech Talent Growth,” was released Thursday by researchers at The Dice, a public policy organization based at Toronto Metropolitan University.
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Among the report's key findings is that female technologists earned an average annual salary of $71,400 in 2021, compared to $91,000 for male technologists. This represents a significant widening of the pay gap between technologists since 2016, when men earned $7,200 more than women.
Viet Vu, Dice's acting director of policy and research, said the increase was surprising given the focus on equity, diversity and inclusion in recent years.
While everything from pay to length of employment associated with remote work could shape the disparity, “idiosyncratic” trends also play a role in the figures, he said.
Vu said women earning between the 60th and 80th percentile in tech — senior managers who haven't yet reached C-suite level — have seen no wage growth over the past five years.
But earnings for men in the same range soared, with those at the top of the range getting a wage increase of $15 an hour more than women.
“This is quite interesting because it takes into account a lot of common factors such as having a new child or how often people change jobs,” Vu said.
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Women are not the only tech workers who experience wage disparities.
When researchers looked at earnings of tech workers of colour in Canada, they found that people of colour earned an average of $78,800 per year in 2021, compared to $93,000 for people not in that group.
The lowest-paid black skilled workers were those earning an average of $70,955, while Filipino workers earned $73,079.
“This is sad news for Black tech workers because in 2016 the wage gap was about $16,000 and now it's actually about $22,000,” Vu said.
But with an average salary of $98,581, Arab tech workers earn more than those who do not belong to visible minority groups.
When the researchers looked at trends among Indigenous tech workers, they found that their average salary was $14,000 lower than their non-Indigenous counterparts, at $86,800.
The study published by Dice was based on census data and concluded that Canadian tech workers earn $40,000 more a year than workers in other fields, but the people behind the study say Canadian tech workers earn, on average, 46% less than their American counterparts.
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The study also looked at capital gains for Canadian tech workers.
The measure has been gaining attention since April, when the federal budget proposed raising the “taxable rate” for people who earn more than $250,000 in capital gains in a year from half to two-thirds.
The median Canadian tech worker has $84,000 in total stocks yet to be sold, and 1,960 tech workers reported capital gains of more than $250,000 in 2021, according to Dice's research.
Based on these figures, the report said that 0.20% of tech workers would be affected by the changes, compared with 0.15% of non-tech workers.
“Changing the tax system by a few percent, or even 10 or 20 percent, is not going to eliminate the 50 percent wage gap with the state,” Vu said.
The government estimates that the tax increase will only affect the richest 0.13% of people and will raise $19.3 billion in revenue over the next five years.
But prominent figures in the tech industry, including Shopify executives, have vehemently opposed the change.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published June 20, 2024.
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