BC's Gender Pay Gap — 2026 Update: Who the Average Leaves Behind

Since the Pay Transparency Act came into force in 2023, the BC government has published an annual report on the province's gender pay gap. Three are now out, each covering the previous calendar year. Read together, they tell two stories at once: a headline number that is slowly improving, and a set of underlying gaps that are not improving nearly as fast — and in some cases are getting worse.

Here is the heart of it. The 14.5% figure describes women as one undifferentiated group. The moment you break it apart, the average stops being a useful description of anyone. Some groups of women sit close to it. Others sit nearly twice as far behind.Gender pay gaps in B.C. by group, 2025. The 14.5% headline reflects women overall; recent newcomer women face a gap more than double that. Source: B.C. Pay Transparency Annual Report (June 2026).What the breakdown shows for 2025:Indigenous women faced a 17% gap, an improvement from 19% the year before.Women aged 55 and over with disabilities earned 18% less than men without disabilities in 2024 — an improvement of seven points from the year before.Racialized women faced a 26% gap, earning 74 cents for every dollar non-racialized men earned — despite holding higher average levels of education than non-racialized men.Recent newcomer women faced a 31% gap, the widest of any group measured. They earned just 69 cents on the dollar, and that gap widened by four points from the previous year.The pattern is consistent across every report: the further a group sits from the demographic majority, the wider the gap; and the more education a group has relative to its pay, the more visible the disconnect. Racialized and newcomer women in BC are, on average, highly educated and concentrated in lower-paid work. That combination is the clearest signal that the gap is not mostly about qualifications.

The Pay Transparency Act, and most of the public conversation around it, is built on pay equality: two people doing the same job should be paid the same. That is the easy part, and it is largely settled in principle. As we noted in our leader's guide to the Act, the Act opens the door to a harder conversation it does not actually resolve: pay equity, the principle that work of equal value should be paid equally, even when the jobs are different.This distinction explains most of the gap the headline number cannot. Very few BC employers today pay a woman less than a man for the identical role; that would be both obvious and indefensible. The gap persists because women and men are concentrated in different kinds of work, and the work that women do is systematically valued less, even when the skill, responsibility, and demand are comparable.

The data describes the gap at the level of the province. But pay is not set at the level of the province. It is set one offer at a time, in thousands of individual hiring decisions — and a few ordinary dynamics in those decisions quietly widen the gap whether anyone intends it or not.In our work with BC employers, one pattern comes up again and again. A candidate who is new to the market — a recent newcomer, someone early in their career, someone who needs the job more than the employer needs them — will accept a lower rate. Not because they are worth less, and often despite strong experience or credentials earned elsewhere, but because their bargaining position is weaker. The rate they accept then becomes their floor. The next raise is a percentage of a number that started too low. Years later, the gap is still there, compounded, and no one along the way did anything that felt unfair in the moment.This is worth naming plainly because it is so easy to miss. It is not a story of bad actors. It is a story of how a market sets prices when bargaining power is unequal, and it helps explain why the newcomer-women gap in the data is the widest of all — and why it widened in 2025.Recognizing the dynamic is the first step to designing around it: structured pay ranges, offers anchored to the role rather than to what the candidate will accept, and periodic equity reviews that catch the compounding before it hardens.It also connects to the bottom of the wage scale more broadly. Where the floor itself is low, the same dynamics play out with even less room to absorb them — a theme we explore in BC minimum wage increases and pay compression and in becoming a living wage employer.

The Pay Transparency Act takes an educational approach: it requires employers to measure and publish their gaps, on the theory that visibility drives change. On the evidence so far, that theory is partly working. The clearest win is job postings — by March 2026, 81% of BC postings included pay information, against 56% across Canada. A behaviour shift that was hard to imagine before the Act, and one that directly strengthens the bargaining position of the candidates described above.The limits are also clear. The Act requires reporting but not remediation, so an employer can publish the same wide gap year after year and remain fully compliant. Employer compliance with the reporting requirement itself slipped to about 64% in the most recent wave, down from roughly 80% in the previous one. And because the gaps that matter most are equal-value gaps rooted in which sectors people work in, a tool focused on within-employer comparison can describe them but cannot, on its own, close them. The framework is a meaningful start. It is not the finish.

On November 1, 2026, the reporting requirement reaches all BC employers with 50 or more employees — roughly 8,500 organizations, many reporting for the first time. If that is you, the patterns in this article are a preview of what your own numbers will likely show, and a guide to reading them honestly. Our companion piece, Pay Transparency Reporting in BC: Are You Ready for November 1?, walks through the operational steps and timeline.Two things this data should change about how you read your own report. First, do not stop at the headline figure — a modest overall gap can still hide a wide one for newcomer or racialized employees, so look at the breakdown. Second, expect much of the gap to be about which roles people hold, not unequal pay within a role. That is a representation and job-design question as much as a pay question, and naming it accurately is more credible — and more useful — than explaining it away.