Comparable Worth in Academe: Professors at Ontario Universities

In 1988 a comparable-worth pay policy was implemented in Ontario, Canada, with the passage of the Pay Equity Act. The Ontario policy is unique in the scope and nature of its involvement in pay determination: it is proactive rather than complaints-based and it covers employees in both the private and public sectors. In this paper we relate the experiences of Ontario faculty under the Act, drawing upon information from a survey we conducted. We then use pay data from the Council of Ontario Universities and Statistics Canada to perform several counterfactual experiments. We find that while the Act had no direct effects, indirectly it may have brought about a slight reduction in the female-male pay gap that exists among Ontario professors especially in the latter part of the 1990s