Gender differences in the canadian economy, with some comparisons to the United States (Part II: Earnings, low incomes, and the allocation of time)

In this sequel to our previous paper, we again look at gender comparisons for the Canadian economy, which we again compare and contrast with the analogous comparisons for the United States economy. Once again, we attempt to ascertain, how different are the various gender comparisons in the two countries. Once again, our principal data sources are Statistics Canada, particularly the two excellent volumes on Women in Canada, for the Canadian figures and Joyce Jacobsen’s fine compilations in her text (1998) for the U.S. figures. In this part of the study, we look principally at income-related matters, such as the gender wage gap and various decompositions of this phenomenon, such as earnings by age of earner and the incidence of low incomes. The second major section of this paper explores questions of time usage and, in particular, how the two genders search for employment when unemployed. Our final section states some tentative conclusions, including our speculative thoughts on why most gender comparisons are so similar on the two sides of the Canadian-American border. Ronald G. Bodkin was professor of Economics at the University of Ottawa from 1975 to June 2001. A revised and shortened version of this paper was presented at the Ottawa Meetings of the Canadian Economics Association, May 1998, and at the 1999 IAFFE Conference on Feminist Economics, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada, June 1999.