Ontario's Pay Equity Act (1987) — Mandatory Job-Comparison Pay Equity, With Gaps in Small and Non-Union Workplaces

Ontario's Pay Equity Act was passed in June 1987 and took effect on 1 January 1988. It required employers to compare female-dominated and male-dominated jobs using four criteria — skill, effort, responsibility and working conditions — and to adjust pay where equivalent-value jobs were paid differently. It applied to employers with more than 10 employees and covered about 1.7 million women at enactment, according to EBSCO's research summary.
Implementation was staged: public-sector employers were to make first adjustments by 1 January 1990 and reach pay equity by 1 January 1995; private employers were phased in by size from 1991 (500+ employees) to 1994 (10–49). Private employers were not required to spend more than 1% of the previous year's payroll annually on adjustments. The Ontario Chamber of Commerce estimated costs could reach five billion dollars.
Policy Options (2017) reports that over $10 million in pay equity adjustments went to employees in female job classes in the previous two years, and that the Service Industry Monitoring Program reached about 4,000 organisations and helped more than 1,000 employers comply. In a 2011 wage gap pilot, more than 80% of surveyed employers responded voluntarily and more than half of responders were found to have a gender wage gap.
Limitations: there is no mechanism to trigger pay equity maintenance in non-unionised workplaces, employers with fewer than 10 employees are exempt, and the sources reviewed do not quantify how much of the narrowing of Ontario's gender wage gap is attributable to the Act.

Read the full analysis: https://policyoptions.irpp.org/2017/06/gender-pay-equity-in-ontario/