Women (still) earn less than men in the arts, culture, and heritage
Analysis of the same types of positions from the 2024 Labour Force Survey
Today’s focus is on the differences in median wages of employed women and men in the same categories of occupations in the arts, culture, and heritage.
This is the last of four posts on wages in the arts, culture, and heritage, all of which are based on the Labour Force Survey (LFS):
A national analysis of gaps between the median wages of cultural workers and those in other sectors
Provincial analysis of what Statistics Canada calls professional workers in the arts, culture, and heritage, a category that includes some artists (producers, directors, conductors, musicians, and writers), translators, other communications professionals, librarians, archivists, conservators, and curators
Provincial analysis of what Statistics Canada calls technical workers in the arts, culture, and heritage, including workers in the performing arts, film, broadcasting, sound recording, libraries, and archives, as well as graphic and interior designers
Today’s analysis includes the professional and technical categories, plus a third (unnamed) category of occupation groups. The third category includes 5 artist occupation groups (dancers; actors, comedians, and circus performers; photographers; craftspeople; and visual artists), theatre designers, fashion designers, select museum and art gallery occupations (e.g., installers, interpreters, restorers, registrars), assistants in film, broadcasting, photography, and the performing arts, as well as sports athletes, coaches, and referees (with coaches representing nearly 2/3 of these sports occupations).
Statistics Canada’s summary categories (e.g., professional, technical, and other) are based on typical levels of training, education, experience, and responsibility (“TEER”) for each category.
The data only include people with employed positions, not the self-employed. In addition, the Labour Force Survey doesn’t have a large enough sample size, even in its annual averages, to delve into occupation-by-occupation details. Hence the focus on a readily available summary grouping (i.e., so-named “professional” and “technical” workers).
In this post, all of the statistics on median hourly wages are calculated as an average for the three most recent years, i.e., 2022 through 2024. 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.
Given the lack of precision in the estimates, I’ve decided to round off the median wage calculations to the nearest dollar. Wage differences are calculated using unrounded figures and may not match the differences in the rounded figures.
In my analyses of the census, I have shown that women represent 54% of all artists in Canada, 42% of workers in arts leadership occupations, and 54% of all cultural workers. Women tend to earn less than men as artists, in most arts leadership positions, and across all cultural occupations. Today’s post extends and updates those analyses by looking at more recent data from a different source, the Labour Force Survey. The LFS provides data based on binary sex categories: women and men.