INRS turns to machine learning to size up individual wealth, exposing a gender divide
Women in Canada consistently hold less wealth than men, and the gap has stayed hidden because national surveys record assets and debts for the whole household rather than for each partner.
New research from the Institut national de la recherche scientifique (INRS) puts a number on that gap for the first time, producing what its authors call the first estimate of individual wealth among Canadians.
The wealth divide tends to run wider than the better-known pay gap.
Statistics Canada reported that women aged 25 to 54 in full-time jobs earned 90 cents at the median hourly wage for every dollar men earned in May 2024, up from 75 cents in 1981.
An earlier Quebec-only survey by Maude Pugliese, a professor at INRS and Canada Research Chair in Family Financial Experiences and Wealth Inequality, found the wealth split far steeper.
Published in late 2023, it showed men held almost 30 percent more average net wealth than women, and among common-law couples men's wealth ran 80 percent higher, at $271,955 against $151,895 for women.
Those gaps, she has argued, run far larger than the pay gaps currently seen between men and women in the province.
Because most Canadian wealth data lumps couples together, inequality within a relationship rarely surfaces in statistics or policy debate.
In the Survey of Financial Security, couples report combined non-pension wealth as a single figure and are never asked who owns what, Pugliese noted in a June essay; with more than half of Canadians partnered, that framing hides a large share of within-couple inequality.
Nor do partners reliably split what they have: fewer than three in 10 Quebec couples with unequal incomes equalized their retirement savings in 2015, her research found.
The new analysis also folds in employer pension assets, which surveys already track for each person.
"In Canada, the gender wealth gap is still largely flying under the radar, especially outside Quebec, because we simply don't measure it," Pugliese said.
She added that the gap is real and that better data are needed to shape policy.
The size of the gap varies by province but has generally narrowed over time, the authors wrote, with the clearest improvement in pension-related assets.
Outside Quebec, where fewer institutional and policy mechanisms deal explicitly with wealth sharing, the disparities stay less visible in both data and public discussion, as per the paper.
Co-author Mamadou Diallo, a PhD candidate in population studies at INRS, tied that progress to method.
"By combining machine learning methods with existing data, we can estimate individual wealth more accurately," Diallo said, adding that the approach opens the way to a clearer read on economic inequality between women and men.
The study gives particular attention to Quebec, where family policies introduced in the late 1990s encouraged women to join the labour market and a distinct legal framework governs how property is shared.
Those measures may have driven a sharper drop in the wealth gap since 2005, especially among younger people, the researchers said.
Similar movement appears elsewhere, including Ontario, which the authors read as a sign that several factors are at work.
Diana Peña Ruiz, a doctoral student in population studies at INRS and co-author of the study, said public policies may have helped narrow the gap, particularly in Quebec.
Trends elsewhere point to a more complex picture, she said, and continued monitoring matters.
The researchers point to a wider hole in Canada's statistical system: the absence of individual-level data on assets and debts.
Fixing how wealth is counted, according to the authors, is a necessary first step toward policies that target inequality inside households.
