Canada's Gender Pay Gap in 2024

By Raulin Cadet | Published Aug. 1, 2025 | Updated Aug. 1, 2025 | Topics: North America, Canada, Gender, Employment, Job market, Pay gap

"True love is pure and sincere. It defies time and space and triumphs over adversity."
— Evelyne & Evans Garçon

"L’amour véritable se veut pur et sincère, il défie le temps et l’espace tout en triomphant des circonstances adverses."
— Original version in French, written by Evelyne and Evans Garçon for the wedding invitation card of my wife Darlyng and me, back on July 31, 2005.

In a previous post, I showed how men are more employed than women in Canada, across most economic sectors. That post focused on employment rates by gender. But today, I continue watching what happens in the job market from a gender perspective, this time by looking at salaries.

This post considers the gap in average hourly wages between men and women across different occupations in Canada. Using the most recent data from Statistics Canada (2024), we examine how much more or less men earn compared to women within the same occupational categories.

The graph of this post shows the top 10 occupations where the gender wage gap is the widest, with men earning more than women. In Legislative and Senior Management Occupations, for example, men earn on average $25 more per hour than women. The gap is $14 for the second occupation category shown in the graph. Similar patterns are observed in middle management in trades and even in legal and scientific professions. Even in 2024, the gender pay gap is strong in high-level roles.

Can policies alone be enough to close the gender wage gap, or does the culture of work need to change too?