Québec was the first Canadian jurisdiction to legislate on pay equity. It did so through the adoption of the Charter of Rights and Freedom,in 1976, a passive legislation since it is based on complaints. It seems to be a matter of time before the Québec Government passes a pro-active legislation on pay equity and, in doing so, it will likely draw its inspiration from the Pay Equity Act(PEA) passed by the Ontario Government in 1987. One of PEA important feature is the emphasis on institutional structures and practices in determining the appropriate unit for the purpose of achieving pay equity. In practice, such units will often match up with the usual job families (e.g. clerical or office vs production jobs).

However, the historical development of jobs families is intertwined with the evolution of occupational segregation between men and women in the labour markets.

This paper looks at the results of two methods of making pay comparisons between predominantly female and predominantly male jobs: the "job to job" approach, designed in a way similar to the provisions of the PEA in Ontario and the "job to line" approach, a more comprehensive one. The results are drawn from the analysis of data from 24 public and private organizations (excluding provincial and federal public sectors) in the province of Québec, with 100 or more employees and having both office and non office (production or maintenance) job families. All these organizations already used job evaluation as part of their wage determination process. The value of each job was established by using a point factor, gender-neutral job evaluation plan. Various regression analysis were conducted to check for and measure wage discrimination. Among the 24 organizations, 17 (or 70%) were found to have wage differentials related to sex between office female jobs and all male jobs. Wage differentials are said gender biased if associated with differences in the sex composition of jobs or jobs families. The average hourly wage differential amounted to 14%.

Results from the two methods of wage comparisons, that is job to job versus job to line comparisons, show that the latter raises the number of predominantly female office jobs to be adjusted under a pay equity operation especially in the larger organizations. There does not appear to be any significant difference however between mean wage adjustments produced by one method or the other