Incomes by gender of artists, arts leaders, and all cultural workers
Income levels vary between cisgender men, cisgender women, transgender people, and non-binary people
A few weeks ago, I showed that transgender and non-binary people gravitate to artist occupations. Based on data from the 2021 census, I found that artists represent 1.9% of all transgender people and 5.1% of all non-binary people in the Canadian labour force. Both percentages are much higher than those for cisgender women (1.1%) and cisgender men (0.9%). I did not have the space for an analysis of incomes in that post.
Today’s post examines the median incomes of cisgender women, cisgender men, transgender people, and non-binary people within four broad groupings of occupations: artists, arts leaders, workers in cultural occupations, and all Canadian workers.
Details about the occupation groups included in each of these categories are available at the end of this post.
I had to receive special approval of the portion of my custom request from the 2021 census related to transgender and non-binary workers. Because of concerns over data reliability, I did not request separate data on transgender women and transgender men, nor did I ask for statistics on transgender and non-binary people in each of the 10 artist occupations. This post examines income statistics for artists as a group, for arts leaders as a group, and for cultural occupations as a group.
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Context: Women, transgender, and non-binary workers have lower incomes in general
In my previous post, I indicated that 73,800 transgender and non-binary Canadians have an occupation, including 40,400 transgender and 33,400 non-binary people. Both transgender and non-binary Canadians have lower personal incomes than cisgender women and, especially, cisgender men.
As shown in the chart below:
Cisgender men have the highest median incomes ($54,400).
Cisgender women have median incomes of $45,600, 16% lower than cisgender men.
Non-binary workers have median incomes of $31,400, 42% lower than cisgender men.
Transgender workers have median incomes of $36,400, 33% lower than cisgender men.
The rest of this post examines median incomes in the arts and culture.