Prince Edward Island Pay Equity Act (1988) — Public-Sector Job-Comparison Pay Equity

Prince Edward Island's Pay Equity Act, passed in 1988, aims to redress systemic gender discrimination in wages paid to female-dominated classes in the public sector. It applies only to public-sector employers and employees. It created a Pay Equity Bureau to monitor employers' progress and compile statistics, and required employers to negotiate with bargaining agents on a gender-neutral evaluation process, inequities between job classes and wage adjustments.
Canada's Fourth CEDAW Report states that before the Act women earned 70.3% of men's wages in PEI, the lowest of any province, and that full-time women's wages had risen to 80.8% of men's, attributing the increase largely to the pay equity process. It also reported that the steps required to implement pay equity in the public sector had been completed, with some wage adjustments still to be made. These are mid-1990s official figures and are not a controlled evaluation.
A 2026 Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives study finds PEI has the smallest weekly gender wage gap in Canada at 5%, with a 2% gap in the public sector versus 20% in the private sector, where the Act does not apply. The same study shows large persisting gaps: 42% for racialized women, the highest in Atlantic Canada, and 17% for non-unionized women. Both the public/private contrast and these gaps are descriptive, not causal, and show the limits of a public-sector-only model.

Read the full analysis: https://www.bayefsky.com/reports/canada/cedaw4/pe_e.html