Canada has spent decades confronting the gender pay gap, enacting legislation and building public awareness around the fact that women earn about 84 cents for every dollar men make. That gap persists because of systemic barriers, and is wider for women who face multiple forms of discrimination.

Yet an equally significant wage penalty for ethnic and racial minorities rarely commands the same attention, and has not prompted a comparable policy response.

Racialized men earn just 78 cents for every dollar non-racialized men earn. Racialized women face a double penalty, earning only 59 cents. Post-COVID pandemic data shows this wage gap remains largely unchanged.

Both injustices are real and well-documented. So why has gender-based pay equity produced dedicated legislative tools, while ethnic and racial wage penalties continue to be addressed unevenly?

As an expert in public policy and ethnic studies, I see the answer lying not in the severity of the problem, but in the mechanisms that bring gender and ethno-racial wage discrepancies to light.

A century of feminist momentum

Progress on gender pay equity has been largely driven by sustained, organized activism. By the time wage discrimination entered mainstream political debate in the 1960s and 1970s, women’s groups had built national coalitions, testified before commissions and established gender inequality as an object of state intervention.

This momentum translated into policy. The 1977 Canadian Human Rights Act defined wage discrimination solely through a gender lens, making it discriminatory “for an employer to establish or maintain differences in wages between male and female employees.”

Ethnicity and race were absent from this definition — a gap that labour organizations and anti-racism advocates have long pushed to change.

The 1995 Employment Equity Act requires federally regulated employers to track representation and remove barriers for four designated groups: women, Indigenous Peoples, persons with disabilities and members........

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