Gender earnings gap in Canadian economics departments

ABSTRACT

The status of women in economics is increasingly researched. However, the gender earnings gap among economics faculty is rarely examined due to data limitations. Relying on Canadian Public Sector Salary Disclosure lists, we construct a unique dataset of earnings, credentials, and research productivity of economics faculty members. We find a ceteris paribus gender earnings gap, which is driven by full professors.

KEYWORDS:

• Gender
• Wage gap
• Academe
• Economics
• Canada

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• I21
• J16
• J44
• J71

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to Christian Zimmermann for helpful information regarding the RePEc lists as well as Echo Wang for an excellent research assistance. Min Hu acknowledges the University of British Columbia’s Start-up Grant and the Department of Economics, Philosophy and Political Science’s Research Grant.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data availability statement

The data are available upon request.

Notes

¹ The Canadian ‘sunshine’ lists, created by provincial governments, report the earnings of any publicly employed person, or employees of organizations receiving public funding, i.e. all major universities and colleges, making 100,000 Canadian dollars salary or higher. The purpose of the lists are to provide accountability and transparency. The exceptions to this rule are provinces of Quebec, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island. Therefore, a few large institutions, such as McGill University and University of Montreal in Quebec, had to be excluded due to the lack of earnings data. For more information, see Appendix Tables 1–2.

Table 1. Descriptive statistics.

² In provinces with a sunshine list, we exclude a few small universities with no dedicated economics department which house economists in other social sciences or business departments. Aside from that, a handful of faculty members missing a complete online CV were excluded. Additionally, as (sabbatical) leaves usually have salary implications, we exclude on-leave faculty. Finally, a number of faculty with major administrative positions (e.g. Dean, Associate Dean), which precludes them from Faculty Collective Agreements and endow them with large salary top-ups were excluded.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the University of British Columbia [2021 Internal Grant].