A gender-based-plus reading of British Columbia's labour market: the wage gap decomposed into its drivers, the youth unemployment penalty, the aging workforce, and how disadvantage compounds across gender and age — each figure shown with its confidence interval, sample size, and limits.
The headline numbers, each traceable to a Statistics Canada or Census table. Every figure below can be inspected as a data table.
How to read this dashboard
Equity estimates here cover gender and age only — the two dimensions our scraped StatCan tables support. Gaps are paired with confidence intervals and sample sizes, and suppressed cells (StatCan hides counts under 30) are left blank rather than guessed. See what we can't yet show.Across BC occupation groups women's median weekly wage trails men's. Decomposition shows most of the gap is within occupations, not between them.
The 18.7 ptsraw gap, split into what occupational sorting explains and what it doesn't.
“Explained” is the part of the gap attributable to men and women working in different occupations. “Unexplained” is the gap that remains within the same occupation group — often read as a proxy for unequal pay for similar work. Here the unexplained component dominates (14.0 pts of 18.7 pts), so occupational sorting accounts for only part of the disparity.
Women's median weekly wage relative to men's (negative = women earn less)
Women ÷ men median weekly wage, BC's largest occupation groups (1.0 = parity)
Correlation -0.23 — female-dominated fields tend to pay less. Bubble size = graduates.
Youth face a persistent unemployment penalty, real wage growth differs sharply by cohort, and participation among workers 55+ has climbed for decades — led by women.
Annual unemployment rate, BC vs Canada (dashed)
Labour-force participation among the 55+ population, by gender (Canada)
Inflation-adjusted (2025 CAD) median-wage CAGR 2000–2025, by age, for BC's six largest occupation groups
Cutting wages by gender × age against each occupation's overall median exposes compounding disadvantage — young women and older women fall furthest below.
Each cell: a gender × age group's median weekly wage vs that occupation's overall median (%)
Reading the heatmap
Blue cells sit above an occupation's overall median; red cells below. The pattern is consistent: prime-age men cluster blue, while young and older women cluster red — the same person can carry both an age and a gender penalty at once.Honest framing is part of the method. These are the boundaries of what this data supports today.
No race, immigration, or Indigenous cuts yet
The scraped StatCan tables support only gender and age disaggregation. Visible-minority, immigration, and Indigenous-identity equity analysis awaits the Census / LFS PUMF microdata.Aggregate cells, not microdata
The Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition runs on employment-weighted occupation cells (table 14-10-0417), not individual responses. A true micro decomposition needs the LFS or Census PUMF.Suppression below n = 30
StatCan suppresses cells under 30 observations, so small occupation × gender × age cells are missing — especially women in male-dominated trades. Blanks are gaps in the data, not zeros.Income geography is national
Field-of-study income comes from the national Census table 98-10-0412, which has no provincial breakdown. Treat field income as a Canada-wide benchmark, not a BC figure.Full methodology and every backing figure: outputs/findings/equity/EQUITY_REPORT.md. Confidence is reported qualitatively — high for large prime-age cells, lower for small youth or trades-women cells.