Is the gender income gap affected by such factors as age, occupation, and education?
All of these factors affect the gender income gap.2 Recent census data released by Statistics Canada, for example, show that gender pay differences are wider among older workers in Canada. Women aged 25 to 29 employed on a full-time, full-year basis earned 85 cents for each dollar received by their male counterparts in 2005. Among women aged 50 to 54, the ratio amounted to just 72 cents. But younger women seemed to have stopped gaining ground in closing the income gap with men. The ratio in earnings between men and women aged 25 to 29 remained unchanged between 2000 and 2005, after seeing steady improvements in the preceding decades. Increased educational attainment among women has traditionally helped to narrow the gender income gap, but it had little impact in the most recent decade for younger women. In 1980, 17.8 per cent of Canadian women aged 25 to 29 employed on a full-time, full-year basis held a university degree. Although this proportion almost doubled to 34 per cent in 2000,
