Canadian HR Reporter

CANADIAN HR REPORTER September 7, 2015 NEWS 13 some of the ways in which you close the pay gap is by tracking the pay gap and… increased transpar- ency around pay," she said. "And I appreciate that the first suggestion involves spending more money on salaries — and the second is not something that private enterprises are always su- per excited about. But the upside, I think, can be seen in, for exam- ple, McMaster (University)'s an- nouncement that they're going to close the pay gap for their female faculty. "You have incredible employee loyalty and you also become an employer of choice for really well- qualified women." Women are outnumbering men amongst university graduates and going into a wider variety of oc- cupations, said McInturff. "They're very well-trained, they're very well-educated and if you're an employer that can show that you're actually paying atten- tion to the pay gap and valuing their work equally, I think you're going to see great employee re- tention but you're also going to attract some great employees." Yet the data has shown for a long time now there continue to be massive disparities between women and men's compensation, said Ritu Bhasin, principal and founder of people strategies firm Bhasin Consulting in Toronto. "When we have more women advancing up the leadership ranks in certain sectors, the expectation would be that there would not be income disparities. I don't think that's always true, especially in industries where for women, the barriers to entry are greater." Addressing industry differences It may be tempting to simply blame the fact that certain regions — and their dominant industries — simply attract more male em- ployees, said McInturff. But that's an oversimplification. "It's not the industries them- selves — what happens is in some regions, you have those male- dominated industries but you don't have equally healthy female- dominated industries," she said. "If you invest a lot in job growth — and Alberta's the obvious ex- ample — in oil and gas and con- struction… and roughly 85 per cent of those employees are men, and you don't also invest say in education, in social services, in health care where the majority of employees are women, then you get that disconnect. You get the majority of women being under- employed, you get women seeking out jobs where they can find them in lower-paying fields such as the service industry, the hospitality industry, and so that also exacer- bates the difference in wages." Male- and female-dominated industries have always been a trend, said McInturff — but it's when investment in one sector vastly outpaces investment in the others that these wage imbalances tend to occur. "I've been accused of being somehow critical of male-domi- nated industries — that's not the case at all. My point is simply that for an economy to be well-bal- anced and for families to be resil- ient (because most families have both men and women in them), you need to invest in both indus- tries where men tend to work and the industries where women tend to work," she said. "at has a great inflating effect on your economy because if you have, for example, a downturn in your oil prices and you have cre- ated a lot of jobs in education and health care, you still have a lot of people who are employed and making a decent wage." at's going to be a real asset to the economy and to families, said McInturff. "e vast majority of families now rely on two incomes and we need to plan our economic poli- cies around that." Systemic problem, individual solutions? Even so, the problem is not limit- ed to certain regions, said Bhasin. "We all lose as a society when we have these disparities… be- cause when women are not being equally rewarded for the work they're doing, it has an impact on families as well and families' re- sources, which then has an impact on children and their education, and their accessibility to quality of life, so it's a societal, systemic failure," she said. But employers can still search for solutions on an individual lev- el, said Vandana Juneja, regional director for central Canada at Catalyst Canada in Toronto. And that starts by considering how they are providing access to career advancement options for both men and women, such as sponsorship programs, she said. "Not only do you want your employees to have a mentor, you also want them to have access to a sponsor." Traditionally, a mentor is some- one who has conversations with you and provides career guidance, said Juneja. "A sponsor is someone who is at a more senior level in the organi- zation and may have more ability to provide impact and influence. And they are not necessarily sit- ting at the table talking to you — they are out there talking about you and advocating on your behalf for that next opportunity." And the CCPA report, in and of itself, is also a platform for this discussion to happen, said McInturff. "I would love to see more sup- port at the national level to bring more people together who are working on these issues on the front lines," she said. "We really have a lot to learn from each other, and I would never want anyone to look at the (city) rankings and think, 'is is terrible, there's nothing we can do about it.'" Invest in men, women for balanced economy GENDER < pg. 1

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