Equal Pay Day in Ontario: Why Legal Compliance Alone Won’t Close the Wage Gap

April 14 is Equal Pay Day in Ontario: the point in the year by which women must work to earn what men earned by the end of the previous year. The gap is wider still for many women facing intersecting disadvantage, including racialized women, newcomers, Indigenous women, and women with disabilities.

Equal Pay Day is a useful reminder, but we should be doing more to debunk the impression that complying with pay equity and pay equality laws will close the gap. These laws capture only a narrow slice of the problem.

A workplace can be legally compliant on paper and still reproduce a substantial wage gap through the way work, opportunity, leave, flexibility, and advancement are structured in practice. That is the part I think employers should be talking about more this Equal Pay Day.

What pay equity, pay equality, and human rights protections actually do

These concepts are related, but they do different work.

Pay equity: equal pay for work of equal value

Pay equity (under the Pay Equity Act) is about comparing different jobs that may not look the same on the surface, but are of comparable value when assessed based on factors like skill, effort, responsibility, and working conditions. Its purpose is to address the historic undervaluation of female job classes. In a nutshell, you compare male-dominated and female-dominated jobs of the same value and increase the pay of the female-dominated jobs to achieve parity.

This gets at a specific problem in our society: the tendency to value work traditionally performed by women much less than work traditionally performed by men.

But notice the limits of that framework. Pay equity does not generally deal with pay inequities among male-dominated jobs, among female-dominated jobs, or in relation to gender-neutral jobs.

Pay equality: equal pay for equal work

Pay equality under Ontario’s Employment Standards Act, 2000 deals with another part of the gender wage gap. It prohibits an employer from paying an employee of one sex less than an employee of the other sex where they perform substantially the same kind of work in the same establishment, with substantially the same skill, effort, and responsibility, under similar working conditions.

The legislation also provides for a number of exceptions. Different rates of pay are permitted where the difference is based on a seniority system, a merit system, a system measuring earnings by quantity or quality of production, or any other factor other than sex.

Here's what this means in practice: a compensation system can reward accumulated service, long hours, constant availability, particular schedules, or output metrics that look neutral on their face. It can do so without violating the equal pay provision, while still distributing pay in highly gendered ways. That is one reason equal pay doctrine does not eliminate the broader wage gap.

Human rights protections: no discriminatory pay differentials on protected grounds

Ontario’s Human Rights Code adds a broader anti-discrimination layer. It protects employees from discrimination in employment because of protected grounds including sex, family status, race, and disability. This protection extends across compensation-related issues such as rates of pay, overtime, hours of work, benefits, shift work, and performance evaluation.

But again, human rights protections are not a complete solution. For example, they do not directly address situations where an employee steps back from higher-paying, more demanding opportunities because household or caregiving responsibilities leave little real alternative.

Why these protections are not enough to close the gap

The legal frameworks above are built to address particular kinds of discrimination and undervaluation. They do not, on their own, fix the broader structure of how earnings are produced.

They do not eliminate occupational segregation. They do not remove the earnings penalty associated with caregiving interruptions. They do not control who gets stretch assignments, client exposure, business-development opportunities, or the files that later translate into compensation and promotion. And they do not undo the premium many workplaces attach to long hours, uninterrupted service, and constant availability.

That is why legal compliance alone will not close the gap. One of the most useful frameworks for understanding the remaining gap comes from Claudia Goldin’s research on “greedy jobs.”

Claudia Goldin’s “greedy jobs” research helps explain why the gap persists

Claudia Goldin’s work is useful here because it shifts the focus from formal pay rules to how jobs themselves are designed and rewarded. In her 2014 American Economic Review article, she argues that the gender gap in pay would be considerably reduced, and might even disappear, if firms did not disproportionately reward people who work long hours and particular hours, and if jobs were restructured to enhance temporal flexibility. She identifies this dynamic as less visible in some sectors and more apparent in corporate, financial, and legal worlds.

That is the core “greedy jobs” insight.

Some jobs do not simply pay more because they involve more work. They pay disproportionately more because they reward continuous availability, unpredictability, immediacy, and the capacity to absorb demanding schedules without interruption. In those roles, earnings are not linear. The person who can be on all the time is not just paid somewhat more. They are often paid much more.

Goldin’s broader body of work, recognized by the Nobel Committee in 2023, shows that the remaining gender gap is closely tied to structural change, social norms, and women’s continuing responsibility for home and family. That helps explain why the gap often persists within occupations, including elite ones.

When workplaces attach a premium to overwork, unpredictability, and uninterrupted service, many couples respond rationally. One partner takes the more flexible role so someone can absorb school pickups, sick days, childcare breakdowns, elder care, and the administrative labour of family life. The other takes the more highly rewarded but less flexible role. Because caregiving still falls disproportionately to women, the economic consequences often do too.

Why flexibility is not just an accommodation issue

One of the most useful implications of Goldin’s research is that flexibility should not be treated only as a one-off accommodation or employee perk. It is also a work-design issue.

Where jobs are structured so that workers are more substitutable, schedules are more predictable, and output depends less on one specific person being constantly available, the penalty for flexibility can shrink. Goldin has used pharmacists as an example of a profession where earnings are much closer to linear with hours worked. More hours still mean more pay, but not because the job carries a premium for being endlessly available.

That is a different model of work that directly targets the wage gap. The goal is to reduce or remove the disproportionate premium attached to inflexible work so that people earn the same prorated amount regardless of whether they work fewer hours or need more control over when those hours happen.

I do think there is a practical limit here in some professions, including law. Goldin is right that redesign matters. I am less convinced that many lawyer jobs can become truly plug-and-play without much deeper institutional change. Some legal roles are intensely interdependent, relational, strategic, and context-heavy. Handoffs are possible. Better team design is possible. Greater predictability is possible. But a fully interchangeable model is harder to imagine in legal practice than in some other occupations. But, that's not a reason to give up on redesign. There are many other solutions available.

What employers should be looking at instead of stopping at pay compliance

If your Equal Pay Day response starts and ends with a legal compliance review, you are probably missing a large part of the picture. The real question is whether the broader system of work is producing unequal outcomes.

Who gets the highest-value files?

Who gets client access?

Who gets the stretch opportunities that later become promotion rationales?

Who gets rewarded for being constantly available?

Who is penalized for needing predictability?

Are flexibility arrangements treated as legitimate ways of working, or as signs of lesser commitment?

Do you require formal accommodation requests to qualify for flexibility, or is flexibility built into the job?

Do some managers gatekeep access to flexibility or accommodation?

Are advancement systems designed around a worker with no caregiving responsibilities?

Do you promote all genders to access equal lengths of paid parental leave?

Are you supplementing government subsidies for childcare and aftercare?

Those questions often tell you more about the wage gap than your pay grid does.

Other important levers: pay transparency, better-designed onboarding and promotion systems, and fair access to relationship-building opportunities and lucrative work. I wrote earlier about one example from the hiring side: a short, well-timed intervention that improved outcomes for equity-deserving candidates, especially women and internationally trained professionals. That is a useful reminder that relatively modest design changes can have meaningful effects when they target the right part of the process.

Equal Pay Day should push employers past compliance-only thinking

Pay equity, pay equality, and human rights protections are necessary. Employers should absolutely care about them. But they're part of the floor, not the ceiling.

If your workplace still attaches a premium to overwork, unpredictability, and uninterrupted availability, you may be reproducing the wage gap even while complying with the formal rules. If women are still more likely to absorb the cost of flexibility, caregiving, and career interruption, the gap will keep reappearing through channels that compensation laws only partly address.

Need help with this work?

I support employers with inclusive workplace design, including hiring and promotion process review, pay transparency law compliance, flexible work policy design, and pay equity and pay equality compliance. This work also includes audits, policy and program design, parental leave and retention supports, and practical strategies to address gender wage gaps. Learn more about my Inclusive Workplace Design services or get in touch.