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.

Interested in a profile of artists in your municipality or province? Subscribe now at the sponsor / shareable level (just $750) to get a custom post with many important breakdowns (occupation, gender, education, age, racialized individuals, Indigenous Peoples). Bonus: you’ll receive access to every other subscribers-only post for the next 12 months.

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.