Has Canada's 21st‐Century Grand Gender Convergence Stalled? Male and Female Income and Human Resource Stock Distributions Viewed Through an Equal Opportunity Lens

• Published date: 01 December 2023
• Author: Gordon Anderson
• Date: 01 December 2023
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/roiw.12610

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Review of Income and Wealth

Series 69, Number 4, December 2023

DOI: 10.1111/roiw.12610

HAS CANADA’S 21ST-CENTURY GRAND GENDER CONVERGENCE

STALLED? MALE AND FEMALE INCOME AND HUMAN RESOURCE

STOCK DISTRIBUTIONS VIEWED THROUGH AN EQUAL

OPPORTUNITY LENS

BY GORDON ANDERSON∗

University of Toronto

The increasing similarity of male and female labor market roles in advanced economies over the

past 50years, dubbed the “Grand Gender Convergence” by Goldin (2014), appears to have stalled.

Given commonality of preferences for workand human resource acquisition across the gender divide,

women and men with similar human resources and efforts should have similar income distributions

in a non-discriminatory equal opportunity equilibrium. However, income convergence is a necessary

but not sufcient condition for a “Grand Gender Convergence” as similarities in incomes could be

achieved with differences in human resources and efforts given discriminatory rewards. In this study,

using new tools for examining distributional convergence processes, the progress of Canada’s 21-st

Century “Grand Gender Convergence” is examined in the context of an equal opportunity paradigm.

While income convergence is almost universally apparent, human resource stock distributions appear

to be diverging, with women having increasingly superior resources to men, evidence that the grand

convergence is not progressing.

JEL Codes: J3, J16, J22, J24, J31, J33, N3

Keywords:human resources, gender, convergencedistributional differences

1. INTRODUCTION

Pursuit of the “gender equity” imperative has been a long and arduous jour-

ney for those in search of economic and social justice for women.1Goldin (2006)

detailed the evolutionary phases of all aspects of women’s increasing involvement

in the measured economy over the past century, which culminated in a “Quiet

Revolution” in perceptions with respect to female and male roles post 1970 and

raised questions as to whether the revolution was petering out. O’Neill (2003)had

a similar theme, arguing that male and female roles in the home need to become

more closely aligned for convergence to be achieved. Goldin (2014) dubbed the

increasing similarity in various aspects of male and female roles “The Grand

Note: Thanks are due to two anonymous refereesand to participants in the International Inequal-

ities Institute Seminar Series at the LSE for their helpful comments and suggestions.

*Correspondence to: Gordon Anderson, Department of Economics, University of

Toronto, Max Gluskin House, 150 St George Street, Toronto, Ontario M5S 3G7 Canada

(gordonj.anderson@utoronto.ca).

1“Join the union girls, and togethersay Equal Pay for Equal Work,” Susan B.Anthony, The Rev-

olution, October 8, 1869. “When women are given the ballot, there will be equal pay for equal work.”

Carrie Ashton Johnson, The Chicago TribuneQuote, 1895.

© 2022 International Association forResearch in Income and Wealth.

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Review of Income and Wealth, Series 69, Number 4, December 2023

Gender Convergence” and reiterated concerns that the process, particularly with

respect to earnings, had stalled. Both Goldin and O’Neill wrote in the context of

gender differences in opportunities and outcomes, addressing normative issues

of fairness and questioning the extent to which unjustiable differences were

being redressed in the convergence process, which raises questions as to what are

“unjustiable differences” and how may their continued reduction be evaluated?

Not all inequalities are bad, in meritocratic incentive-driven economies; some

inequalities are necessary and socially justiable for promoting efcient resource

allocation (Autor, 2014); the trick is to separate the justied from the unjustied

and seek elimination of the unjustied inequalities. The equality of opportunity

literature addresses this by seeking the elimination of inequalities arising from cir-

cumstances beyond an agent’s control, and gender would be such a circumstance.

However, such changes seldom happen instantly; it is a process and, when two

groups are deemed to be unjustly unequal, convergence in every aspect of their

respective differences should be the societal goal both attitudinally and as a matter

of public policy so that, in the gender equity context, increasing similarities in all

aspects of male–female labor market roles should be accompanied by increasing

similarities in their corresponding rewards.

Workplace gender equity or equal pay for equal work has typically been seen

to require similarity in male and female earnings when producingsimilar goods, but

this is only part of the story. Denoting the amalgam of an individual’s education,

skill, and experience as their human resource stock, earnings are the reward for an

individual’s efforts (length and intensity of work spells) in deploying their resource

stock in productive activity. A particular challenge in analyzing this relationship is

the inherently latent nature of intensity of effort, and the fact that it is also used

in acquiring education, training, and experience as well as income, rendering its

impact difcult to disentangle (Jusot et al.,2013). To the extent that efforts and

human resources are substitutable in the workplace, one gender could achieve the

same productive outcome as the other by combining fewer human resources with

more effort or vice versa. Without a directly observable intensity of effort variable,

gender differences in human resource and observed effort levels can be ambigu-

ously interpreted as differences in preferences for effort. Indeed, Goldin (2014), in

noting the disproportionate rewards for working longer more inhospitable hours

in the professions, cites numerous studies indicating that men tend to work longer

and more inhospitable hours than women. However,this may not be so much a

reection of intrinsic gender differences in preferences for effort, but more a reec-

tion of women’s different lifecycle circumstances relative to those of men, which

O’Neill (2003) and Goldin (2006) argued could be redressed to a degree by more

male partner participation in domestic production.

Given the gender equity in preferences for effort, equality of opportunity

demands similarity in rewards forsimilar efforts in applying similar resource stocks

if there is to be similarity in earnings when producing similar goods. Alterna-

tively put, similar efforts should yield similar income distributions across similar

domains of education, training, and experience. In such a situation gender des-

ignation becomes immaterial and will not affect the earnings, effort, and human

resource stock relationship. In effect men and women become perfect substi-

tutes and completely exchangeable in the labor market so that, in equilibrium,

© 2022 International Association forResearch in Income and Wealth.

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