Long-term changes in median wages for broad categories of arts and culture employees

Also: Has there been progress in decreasing the gender wage gap?

Have the earnings of arts and culture workers kept up with inflation since 2000? Have there been different trends for different categories of cultural workers? For women and for men? These are the questions that I explore in today’s post.

This is the final installment in a series of articles on the earnings of employees (not the self-employed), based on the Labour Force Survey. My analysis has covered:

• Some professional workers in the arts and culture, a category that includes some artists (producers, directors, conductors, musicians, and writers), translators, other communications professionals, librarians, archivists, conservators, and curators

• Some technical workers in the arts and culture, including technical workers in libraries, archives, motion pictures, broadcasting, and the performing arts, as well as graphic and interior designers

• An unnamed third category (in general, occupations where most people have not completed a bachelor’s degree), including many artists as well as a number of other occupation groups, including a few in sports.

• The differences in median wages of women and men in the same categories of occupations in the arts and culture.

• My understanding of Statistics Canada’s approach to these classifications, which are based on typical levels of training, education, experience, and responsibility (“TEER”) for each category.

In today’s post, the median hourly wages are calculated as an average for the three years including the stated year. For example, the data labelled as 2022 are actually a 3-year average from 2020 through 2022. Similarly, the data for 2000 are a 3-year average from 1998 through 2000. This approach smooths out some, but not all, of the unusual shifts in the data that might be due to its relatively low sample size, even for these broad categories.

All the wage statistics have been adjusted for inflation and are stated based on their equivalent value in 2022. Note that the 2022 data in the cultural categories are slightly different than previously published, given the inflation adjustment in today’s post for 2020 and 2021.

There is simply no room in this post for provincial analysis. If you’re particularly interested in this, let me know in a comment or via email. Currently, I am planning on moving on from this dataset to an analysis of the number of cultural workers, using downloaded census data.