Gender and Job Quality

All information reported in the Gender and Job Quality Indicators section of www.jobquality.ca were derived directly from the CPRN publication Men’s and Women’s Quality of Work in the New Canadian Economy by Karen Hughes, Graham S. Lowe, and Grant Schellenberg (2003) as well as additional analysis conducted by these same authors for CPRN.

Data Sources

Data for the research was derived from two data sources:

1) The 2000 CPRN-Ekos Changing Employment Relationships Survey (CERS)

This telephone survey interviewed 2,500 currently employed Canadian residents 18 years of age or older. Quotas were assigned by region (determined by each province’s population as a percentage of the whole Canadian population) to ensure that the sample would be nationally representative. A probability sample of this size and design has a margin of error of plus or minus 2 percent, 19 times out of 20.

The survey used a household-based sample frame by drawing from a randomized database comprised of all telephone directories published in Canada, supplemented with randomly generated telephone numbers to ensure that unlisted telephone numbers also had an equal chance of being called. Interviews were conducted by trained, experience and bilingual Ekos staff using a computer-assisted telephone interviewing (CATI) system. Households were called eight times before a number was retired in the absence of a response. 2,500 individuals completed interviews, conducted in early 2000.

The data were reviewed against the population distribution of province, age, gender and industry, using Statistics Canada’s Labour Force Survey (LFS). The CERS data are weighted for gender and age to correct for slight sample variations from the LFS.

In addition to measuring trust, commitment, communications, influence and the legal aspects of employment relationships, the questionnaire also collected information on respondents’ socio-demographic characteristics, labour market and workplace contexts, and individual and organizational outcomes of relevance to employment relationships. Where possible, questionnaire items were replicated or adapted from academic research and Statistics Canada surveys, and several recent policy-oriented surveys conducted in Europe.

2) The 2000 General Social Survey (GSS)

The 2000 General Social Survey examined access to and use of computer technologies in Canada. Using a telephone survey, 25,090 individuals were interviewed between January and December 2000. The sample included all persons 15 years of age and older in Canada, with the exception of residents of the Yukon, Northwest Territories and Nunavut, and full-time residents of institutions. Stratified sampling by province and census metropolitan area was used to ensure the sample was nationally representative. Data was collected though a computer-assisted telephone interviewing (CATI) system. The overall response rate was 80.8 percent.

Data collected through the 2000 GSS includes standard socio-demographic information, as well as information on the following issues: general use of technology and computers, work and education background, computer technology in the workplace, development of computer skills, Internet and e-mail use, children’s use of technology, security and information on the Internet.

For details see: Statistics Canada, 2000 General Social Survey: Public Use Microdata File Documents and User’s Guide (2001).

Job Quality Deficits

Hughes, Lowe, and Schellenberg (2003, pg. 25) provide the following description of their methodology used to measure the discrepancy between what workers want and what they have - in other words, their job quality deficits.

They compared individuals’ responses to similar questions on the importance placed on specific job features (values) with the extent to which they have these features in their current job. For each pair of questions, the individual’s score on what they actually have in their job is subtracted from what they would want in their job. For example, if a person says that good communication is ‘very important’ to them (a score of five on a five-point scale) and ‘strongly agrees’ they have good communication in their job (also a score of five on a five-point scale), they would have a ‘discrepancy score’ of zero (five minus five) – or no discrepancy. On the other hand, if they say ‘good communication is ‘very important’ and ‘strongly disagree’ that they have good communication in their job (a score of one), a discrepancy score of –4 would result (one minus five), indicating a large gap between ‘wants’ and ‘haves’.

To identify general patterns, they also added up the discrepancy scores for related items into the five scales, including: psychological attachment, extrinsic rewards, intrinsic rewards, communication, and work-family balance. Each of the resulting scales has a minimum value of –8 and a maximum value of +8. Individuals with scores of–8 to –3 are identified as having a ‘large discrepancy’, while those with scores of –2 to +8 are identified as having ‘no discrepancy’. They refer to these calculations of discrepancies as job quality deficits.