What Three Years of Reports Show
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: an average gap that is slowly improving, and a set of underlying inequities that are not improving nearly as fast — and in some cases are getting worse.
The Headline: Real Progress, Slowly
The third annual report, released June 2026, confirmed a steady downward trend. Before the Act came into force in 2022, women in BC earned 18.4% less than men based on median hourly wages. By 2025 that gap had narrowed to 14.5%, meaning women earned about 85 cents for every dollar males earned. It’s an improvement worth celebrating.
Two caveats put progress in perspective. It is slow — roughly a point a year, which on the current trajectory would take more than a decade to close. And despite the improvement, BC still had the third-highest gender pay gap of any Canadian province in 2025 (14.5% against a national figure of 12.6%).
The Average Is the Wrong Number to Watch
Here is the heart of it. The 14.5% figure describes women as one undifferentiated group. The moment you break it down, the average stops being a useful description of anyone.
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.
Equal Pay Is the Easy. Equal Value Is the Hard Part.
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. As we noted in our leader's guide to the Act, the Act opens the door to a harder conversation: pay equity, the principle that work of equal value should be paid equally, even when the jobs are different.
Early Childhood Education: A Case in Point
Consider early childhood education. It is among the most demanding and important work in the economy — caring for and educating young children requires training, patience, judgment, and enormous responsibility for safety and wellbeing. It is also overwhelmingly performed by women, and it is paid far below trades or technical roles that require comparable training time.
How the Gap Gets Set, One Hire at a Time
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 keeps cropping up: A candidate who is new to the market — a recent newcomer, someone early in her career, desperate for work — will accept a lower rate.
Is the Reporting Framework Helping?
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.
What This Means If You Have to File
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.
Aurora's Perspective
From the practice
We read these reports as a map of where the work is, not as a scorecard. The headline progress is real and the transparency rules are doing some good. But the gaps that matter most — for newcomer, racialized, and Indigenous women, and for everyone doing undervalued work in female-dominated sectors — will not close on visibility alone.
They close when employers build pay structures that value roles consistently, anchor offers to the work rather than to a candidate's bargaining position, and review pay for compounding inequities before they harden. That is the substance of a real Total Rewards Strategy, and it is where the average finally starts to mean something for the people it currently leaves behind.
Build pay that values the work.
Aurora HR helps mission-driven BC organizations design compensation structures that hold up to public scrutiny and close the gaps an average hides.
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