A Data-driven Exploration of Equal Pay in the Ontario Government
Every year, the Province of Ontario publishes a searchable list of public sector employees that are paid $100,000 or more in base salary for the calendar year. And every year, I find myself perusing the online database and accidentally searching for all of my friends in the public sector (and seeing if they received that raise they rightly deserve!)
Based on these publicly disclosed datasets, there are many non-government websites that have taken this data and made shinier versions that not only show salaries, but also how they rank amongst their sector, employer and position. While doing a great job on exploring an individual’s stats, none of these sites have done any aggregation to see how groups of people are doing over time.
I proceeded to take 24 years of data (1996 to 2019) in order to find any interesting trends that presented themselves in the aggregate. Before we dive in, let’s get some assumptions and limitations out of the way:
ASSUMPTIONS & LIMITATIONS
This is not intended to take a position on either side of the Equal Pay discussion, only exploring what the data shows
Gender was not provided in these datasets, so I relied on a gender-guesser Python package that classifies individuals by their first names
The years covered were condensed to 2014 to 2019, as fewer and fewer individuals made the $100,000 threshold the further we go back in time
Any exploration of ideas has not been backed by qualitative research, or even anecdotal evidence
I will strictly use “male”, “female” and “gender” as that was how the data is labelled
SECTORS & POSITIONS
Having sorted all of the data, I thought it best to narrow it down by the twelve positions with the most individuals within them. Amongst these twelve positions, it was more intuitive to group them into a handful of sectors and highlight specific positions that stood out:
University Professors - Highest male-to-female earnings ratio
Police Constables - Second highest male-to-female gender ratio
Registered Nurses - Highest female-to-male gender ratio
College Professors - Negligible male-to-female earnings ratio
Secondary Teachers - Negligible male-to-female earnings and gender ratio
UNIVERSITY PROFESSORS
This lot represents the highest paid amongst our group, but also the largest earnings gap between males and females. Over the most recent five years however, the gender ratio has been shrinking. A steady increase of female professors are breaking the $100,000 threshold compared to a much lower rate of growth for male professors. In spite of this, both of the mean and median earnings deltas widened consistently during the same time period. Here are some possible inflammatory headlines to represent this data:
“Female Professors Finally Getting Paid More, Just Not Too Much More.”
“Are Male Professors Still Getting Promoted?”
“Top Earning Male Professors Make Too Much”
“Equal Pay Will Be A Long Journey (Unless Men Start Dying Faster)”
“The Richest Male Profs Keep Getting Richer”
What is the more likely cause of this? Without more qualitative data to peel back the flow and rationale of promotion (or conscious/unconscious bias), it is impossible to nail down. But what we do know is that female professors are crossing the threshold at a faster rate than male professors. Also, the males that left their positions (for whatever reason) were on the lower end of the earnings spectrum (earning less than the mean and median), which statistically increases both mean and median salaries for males.
POLICE CONSTABLES
Firefighters represent the highest male-to-female gender ratio, but their numbers were too few compared to second place: Police Constables. For those above the $100,000 threshold in this profession, males outnumber females by a ratio of 4.09:1 in 2019. However, this imbalance has been dropping over the years from a ratio as high as 5.75:1 back in 2014.
Much like University Professors, we’re seeing a slow and steady increase in the rate of females crossing the earnings threshold. By outnumbering the increase of second quartile male Constables, once again we’ll see an increase in both mean and median earnings gaps even though we’re getting better female representation overall.
REGISTERED NURSES
On the flip side of the gender ratio, female Registered Nurses outnumber males by an average of 6.4:1 over the last six years. Despite this one-sidedness, male Registered Nurses are still making marginally more both in mean and median figures even though the pay scale grid is standardized. This could be explained by the mean tenure of Registered Nurses, as the data shows males tend to stay in the position slightly longer than females and therefore be able to earn more with seniority.
COLLEGE PROFESSORS
Now things get interesting with College Professors (community colleges), where males consistently outnumber females by an average of 28% over the last six years—yet pay differences are negligible year-to-year. This could be due to a unionized pay structure, or it could be that the variance in pay at a College is substantially less than at a University (which benefits from top-ups and research grants). So if there is less opportunity/incentive to make more than your base salary, it might be much easier to keep pay equal for the same job.
Note: There was a strike in 2017
SECONDARY TEACHERS
Within the last six years, the gender ratio of Secondary Teachers has flipped from mostly male to mostly female. This has resulted in average earnings balancing out between the two, albeit still slightly in favour of male teachers (but largely negligible). Are Secondary Teachers the holy grail of equal pay models, as the equalization of gender parity has resulted in the equalization of pay?
Note: There were rotating strikes in 2016
DANGERS
With any controversial topic, it is easy to fan the flames on either side of the argument, especially under the guise of data-driven insights. Most of the time we lack the necessary inputs to have a proper holistic view, and the rest of the time we are dealing with a multi-faceted wicked problem that won’t have a simple cause and solution. This exploration was never meant to prove anything about pay equality in the upper echelon of public service, but instead how digging into the data and having even rudimentary data-literacy can help avoid the dangers of a clickbait headline.
“Data scientists are involved with gathering data, massaging it into a tractable form, making it tell its story, and presenting that story to others.” – Mike Loukides
