City's glass ceiling firmly intact, Sunshine List shows
Of municipality's top 500 earners in 2017, only 11% were women
As Ottawa city councillors prepare Wednesday morning to discuss whether the city needs a women's bureau, perhaps our elected officials should take heed of this startling statistic: Of the top 500 earners at the City of Ottawa last year, a mere 11 per cent were women.
That's about 56 women. Out of 500.
And that list does not include the male-dominated Ottawa Police Service, a department that has its own gender issues, but at least has a formal process underway to try to deal with them.
The fire department is included. In fact, male firefighters dominate among the biggest earners at the city. More than 270 chiefs, captains, lieutenants and frontline firefighters cracked the top 500, but only three of them are women.
Some 32 paramedics made the top 500, only two of them women.
There may be historical reasons why men are still dominating emergency services departments.
Fire Chief Gerry Pingitore pointed out that in the past, promotions were "heavily weighted by seniority." So it would take 20 years to become a lieutenant, for example, and 22 years to become a captain. Considering the first female firefighter joined the force 20 years ago, it's not a surprise there are few women at the top of the department's pay scale.
Disparity extends to bureaucracy
The low representation of women in the upper echelons extends to the wider city bureaucracy as well. Removing all fire and paramedic employees from the list of the top 500 earners leaves about 200 city employees. Of those, only about 50 are women.
In other words, just 25 per cent of the city's best-paid bureaucrats are female.
CBC News looked at the top 500 employees listed under the City of Ottawa, including Ottawa Public Health and Ottawa Public Library employees, departments where women generally do well in terms of seniority. We then counted the number of women on the list, going by name. In the few instances where it wasn't clear if the name was male or female — think Chris or Terry — we counted that person as a woman, just to be on the generous side.
The idea to look at the top 500 employees actually came from Coun. Scott Moffatt. Earlier this month, he was challenged on Twitter about the representation of women at the top of the city's bureaucracy after a local newspaper columnist pointed out there were only three women in the top 20 earners on the 2016 Sunshine List.
In 2017, there were six women in the top 20, if you don't count first responders.
Unfortunately, I don't have specific insight into that. I think it's easy to look at a list and see what you are seeing. There's likely a lot more to that, though. I'm sure HR could provide data. This is why a report would be useful. It could validate or counter your perception.
—@ScottMoffatt21"I believed that number, but I also thought that, if you delved deeper into the list, maybe there's more equality," Moffatt said in an interview. "I wanted to have some evidential material for the debate, as opposed to just some of the rhetoric that gets thrown around sometimes."
He looked at the top 500 earners from 2016, and found that only about 17 per cent of the names on that list were women. Then the councillor wondered if following the staff reorganization from late 2016, where a number of high-ranking managers were let go, that perhaps women would fare better in 2017.
Not so.
Moffatt said he was surprised by the low representation of women in the top 500.
While he didn't have any preconceived notions of how many women were at the top of the list, he figured that "there'd be some balance in the end."
Working on gender equity
Looking at the municipal bureaucracy more broadly, the city said that for management generally, which it counts from the program manager level on up, 41 per cent are women.
The city said it's been developing women through its corporate leadership program and that 58 per cent of the current class are women. About 40 per cent of the participants in the general manager succession program started last year are women.
The fire department is in its ninth year of a camp for female firefighters in training.
But are these efforts working? Or perhaps the question is, are they working quickly enough. Consider that the corporate leadership program has been around for 12 years. The fire service currently has 60 female career firefighters — which translates into just six per cent of the entire professional firefighting staff.
There's no shortage of possible reasons for women's poor showing at the very top of the city's earning scale, from workplace culture to family demands to the historical dominance of one sex in certain departments. But there's no point guessing.
"I think you try to find out what's the cause," said Moffatt. "Why are certain people applying for jobs while others aren't? Or why are some people getting jobs that others aren't? As an employer, you don't want to have any obstacles to advancing your best and brightest."
On Wednesday, council will debate Coun. Diane Deans's motion to include the study of a gender policy in next year's governance review. After a bit of misinformation about what she was actually proposing — including the mayor suggesting it was about the city trying to get women to run for council — it seems likely the proposal will pass.
The motion actually has nothing to do with the number of women among the city's top earners. Or at least not directly. But the stark reality of how few women are on that list is an important reminder that we can't just assume that gender parity, or other forms of diversity, will just happen on their own. It takes a plan, and likely it takes time, but mostly it takes leadership.
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