The gender pay gap for academic staff in Canada narrowed significantly, according to a report by CAUT released recently.

According to the data, the overall gender pay difference was nearly 19 per cent in 1986 and fell to just less than 11 per cent in 2006. Adjusting for rank and age, the gap almost disappeared for lecturers, and fell to under 4.5 per cent for other ranks.

“I believe these are real advances largely attributable to the unionization of academic staff,” said CAUT president Penni Stewart. “A larger pay gap remains in many other sectors where unionization is less prevalent.”

Adjusting for age, the data collected for 2006 shows women in the assistant professor rank made 96.1 per cent of that earned by their male counterparts, female associate professors earned 96.9 per cent, and female full professors earned 95.5 per cent. Among lecturers, women earned 99.1 per cent.

And it confirms earlier research that found differences in average pay by discipline have a relatively minor impact on the salary gap, accounting on average for no more than 1 per cent of salary differentials.

The study suggests that while overt discrimination may play a role, it is more likely that the remaining salary differential between men and women is a by-product of university salary structures and procedures that have the effect of disadvantaging women on average: differences in starting salaries, market supplements and merit awards, as well as the impact of career interruptions.

“These are factors that we have to find bet­ter ways to address in order to ensure greater equity,” said Stewart.

The major limitation of the study is that available data do not include important variables that are essential for a complete picture of salary distribution among all academic staff.

“The Statistics Canada faculty salary survey on which the CAUT study is based does not include data on key demographic factors,” said CAUT executive director James Turk. “This prevents us from examining the extent to which, as shown elsewhere, that wages of racialized, Aboriginal and academic staff with disabilities are well below their other colleagues.”

He said CAUT continues to press StatsCan to include complete demographic data in its university and college academic staff survey.