Across job categories, women earn less than men in the same types of positions in the arts, culture, and heritage

Despite being more than half of employees in most categories

Today’s focus is on differences in the median wages of women and men in the same categories of occupations in the arts and culture.

This is part of a series of posts on the earnings of employees (not the self-employed), all of which are based on the Labour Force Survey (LFS). Statistics Canada provides readily available data for the following groupings:

• 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 (but excluding technical workers in art galleries and museums)

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

In an explanatory post last week, I offered 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.

Next week, I will examine longer term trends in the median wages of workers in the three readily available categories, including the differences between women and men.

Useful notes to keep in mind about the Labour Force Survey:

• It doesn’t have a large enough sample size to delve into the details for individual occupation groups, which is why the broader categories are helpful.

• It captures data for binary sex categories: women and men.

• Its earnings statistics only include people with an employment position, not the self-employed. Because artists have very high self-employment rates, many of them are excluded from the earnings data, along with other self-employed cultural workers. However, those self-employed artists and cultural workers who have an employed position in their main job are included.

In this post, all of the statistics on median hourly wages are calculated as an average for the three most recent years, i.e., 2020 through 2022. This was done in order to smooth out significant year-to-year variations that were probably just a result of the relatively small sample size of the LFS.

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Women earn less than men in all three categories

Women earn less than men in the same types of positions in the three job categories for which we have readily available data for employees in the arts, culture, and heritage.