As the average national salary in Canada continues to rise, the gender wage gap still remains at about 12%. When this figure is broken down by industry, it’s clear some jobs have much higher pay gaps than others. Based on data gathered from job search engine, Adzuna, many industries that have large pay gaps are also in high-demand. Most notably, the job position with the highest pay gap of 39.4%, Employment Counsellors, account for more than 3% of all job listings on the site.

Based on a study conducted by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), Canada had the 7th highest gender pay gap among 34 other countries. One of the reasons for this discrepancy is that there are less women working in certain industries with higher salaries. Based on salaries listed on Adzuna, more than half of the top 15 positions with the highest pay gaps also have salaries that are higher than the national average.

While there are other factors that influence the difference in compensation between men and women, a large portion of the gender pay gap cannot be explained by career or life choices. This percentage is presumably due to gender discrimination.

According to the Canadian Federal Finance Minister, Bill Morneau, Canada can make efforts to decrease the level of discrimination in the workplace and should not accept having such a high pay gap. The women’s labour force participation rate is currently 61%. Closing the gender wage gap would increase the participation rate which would in turn boost the Canadian economy greatly.

Although there have been significant changes within some jobs to close the pay gap, data from Statistics Canada suggests that there are still many industries in the labour market that have not made changes to their policies on the gender wage gap. Here are the industries with the largest pay gaps between men and women.

As seen in the figure below, the job title with the highest wage gap is ‘Employment Counsellors’ as average men’s salary within this position is $1,512.54 per month, whereas a woman with the same position earns $916.08 per month. Second on the list are ‘Photographers’ with a 38,60% gap. The average male photographer earns approximately $1,060.13 per month whereas a female photographer earns a mere $651.01 per month.

Furthermore, male ‘Managers’ within the ‘Publishing, Broadcasting, Performing Arts, Motion Pictures’ Industry, earn roughly $1,747.56, whereas female ‘Managers’ within the same industry earn about $1,077.02. The jobs in industries with the lowest gender gap are ‘Waiters/Waitresses and Hosts/Hostesses’, ‘Supervisors within the Motor Vehicle Industry’ as well as ‘Editors’ with a percentage of 29.50, 29.20 and 28.50 respectively.