Pay Equity

I used to believe we had largely achieved pay equity in Canada. We have laws and workplace policies that prohibit discrimination and require equal pay for work of equal value. I now understand that achieving pay equity also means examining the barriers that affect people’s opportunities to work, earn, and advance in their careers. For many mothers, those barriers begin at home.

 

After a decade working as a tax specialist and preparing thousands of personal income tax returns, one pattern became increasingly apparent: fathers’ incomes often remained relatively stable, or even increased, throughout parenthood while mothers’ incomes were frequently tied to an entirely different set of factors than before giving birth. Things like the number of children they had, the age(s) of their child(ren), access to child care, cost of child care, whether their child(ren) were in school, and any special needs of their child(ren).

 

A 2023 study confirms the disparity in income I saw. It estimated that mothers experienced a 49% earnings penalty in the year their first child was born. Ten years later, that penalty remained at 34.3%. Fathers experienced no comparable persistent earnings penalty.

 

Where Inequity Begins

Having a child immediately changes a parent’s freedom to choose when and how to work. There are physical realities of pregnancy and childbirth that can have a clear impact on the birthing parent’s ability to earn in the short term. Beyond that, there is the reality that someone must be available to provide care for the child.

 

Employment Insurance (EI) benefits for parents are broken into two parts: maternity benefits, which are just for birthing parents and parental benefits, which any new parent can apply for. Considering that EI replaces just 55% of insurable earnings under standard parental benefits (to a maximum, per the Government of Canada), many families simply can’t afford to have both parents take substantial time away from work.

 

According to Employment and Social Development Canada’s 2024–25 report, just 41.6% of completed standard EI parental benefit claims involved parents sharing leave. Even when benefits were shared, women received an average of 31.5 weeks compared with 8.3 weeks for men.

 

Not every new parent qualifies for these benefits or needs them. Nonetheless, the way they are used demonstrates how child care tends to disproportionately affect mothers’ incomes in the first year of parenthood for many Canadians.

 

How the Inequity Continues

The way parental benefits are used doesn’t necessarily create a long-term barrier to earning for mothers. However, I believe that it can set a precedent of mothers sacrificing earnings to accommodate their children’s needs – one that can easily become an expectation rather than a free choice.

 

Access to affordable, adequate child care remains a significant barrier to employment for many parents. Even with child care, or once children are in school, someone still has to cover sick days, appointments, and school closures. Mothers tend to absorb more of that load, and it shows up in their earnings in many ways. Three of the clearest are:

 

Employment rates: According to Statistics Canada, in 2023, 79.8% of mothers with children 17 years old or younger at home were employed, compared with 93.4% of fathers.

 

Hours worked: That same study showed that employed mothers were nearly five times as likely as employed fathers to work part-time (17.6% compared with 3.7%). Among mothers and fathers working part-time, nearly half (46.1%) of mothers mainly did so to take care of their own children, compared to 15.8% of fathers.

 

Wages: Not every position or employer can accommodate the flexibility that having children (especially multiple children or children with greater health needs) requires. I have seen many well-educated, incredibly skilled mothers settle for jobs with lower pay but greater flexibility as a result.

 

When Inequity Turns into Vulnerability

I want to be clear that there is nothing inherently wrong with a mother choosing to stay home with her children or reducing her working hours to better attend to their needs. These can be meaningful and deeply wanted choices.

 

The question is whether those are truly free choices, and whether the unpaid care work is valued – for what it gives the children, for what it costs the mother, and for what it allows the other parent to earn.

 

According to Statistics Canada, in 2022, mothers in different-gender couples spent an average of 7.5 hours per day caring for their children, while fathers spent 4.9. Mothers also head 81% of one-parent families with children five or under (Statistics Canada), where the day-to-day care falls largely to them. I don’t believe for a minute that all of that discrepancy in unpaid care work is wanted by, or mutually decided with, every woman experiencing it.

 

Unequally shared child care isn’t economic abuse in itself. But when a mother absorbs most of the caregiving, not by choice, but because the other parent opts not to, the resulting barriers to her employment can become a form of economic abuse, particularly when her unpaid labour is exploited at the expense of her own earning capacity and financial autonomy.

 

Unequal access to earning can also leave a parent more vulnerable to other forms of economic abuse, such as the higher earner assuming more say over money or restricting the other parent’s access to it.

 

The vulnerability becomes clearer when we stop looking at parents’ incomes as a family unit and start looking at them as two individuals. Are both parties equally able to leave the relationship in the face of unequal child care responsibilities and the resulting income discrepancy? Are these inequities adequately acknowledged and accounted for in child support and spousal support outcomes for parents who aren’t together? The answer is too often no.

 

Closing the Wage Gap

There is plenty of room for improvement on the part of government: more inclusive access to maternity and parental leave; a more sustainable EI amount for new parents; accessible, affordable child care; and better implementation of existing child support and spousal support laws are all essential to mitigating the negative impacts that parenting can have on mothers’ economic stability.

 

Most of the available data compares mothers and fathers or looks at different-gender couple families and one-parent families. Families take many forms, and efforts to close these gaps must account for all of them.

 

But pay equity cannot be achieved through policy alone. We also need to examine how parenting responsibilities are distributed within families, and how those arrangements affect each parent’s opportunity to earn. As long as one parent’s career is consistently expected to accommodate the needs of the family while the other’s remains relatively uninterrupted, the opportunity to earn cannot be truly equal.

 

As Gloria Steinem often said: women will not be equal outside the home until men are equal inside it.

 

By Dawn Evans, Tax Specialist, Survivor