Researchers deliver Canada’s first individual wealth estimate, revealing a hidden gap
Canadian women hold consistently less wealth than men in every province, yet the way the country collects financial data keeps that gap out of sight.
That is the finding of new research from the Institut national de la recherche scientifique (INRS), which produced what its authors call the first estimate of individual wealth among Canadians.
Most asset and debt figures in Canada come from the household level, a practice that masks disparities between partners within a couple.
To work around that limit, the team drew on five cycles of the Survey of Financial Security covering 2005 to 2023 and applied machine learning to estimate wealth at the individual level.
The analysis also folded in employer pension assets, which are already recorded individually.
The results, published in the journal Canadian Studies in Population, show women holding less wealth than men across the board, though the size of the gap varies by province and has generally narrowed over time, particularly for pension-related assets.
"As long as wealth is only measured at the household level, inequality within couples remains invisible," said Maude Pugliese, the study's lead author and holder of the Canada Research Chair in Family Financial Experiences and Wealth Inequality.
She added that the findings show "the gap is real and that better data are essential to inform policy."
Pugliese, based at INRS's Urbanisation Culture Société Research Centre, noted the disparity flies under the radar especially outside Quebec, where the country simply does not measure it.
The study also looked closely at Quebec, where family policies introduced in the late 1990s to support women's participation in the labour market, along with a distinct legal framework for property sharing, may have contributed to a sharper reduction in the wealth gap since 2005, particularly among younger generations.
The researchers cautioned against reading too much into the provincial contrast, since similar trends appear elsewhere, including Ontario.
"Our findings suggest that public policies may have helped reduce the gap, particularly in Quebec, but similar trends elsewhere show that the issue is more complex," said co-author Diana Peña Ruiz, a doctoral student in population studies at INRS.
"Continued monitoring over time is essential."
The method itself is part of the point, co-author Mamadou Diallo said.
"By combining machine learning methods with existing data, we can estimate individual wealth more accurately," according to Diallo, a PhD candidate at INRS.
He added that the approach "opens the door to a clearer understanding of economic inequalities between women and men."
The authors argue that Canada's statistical systems carry a critical blind spot in the absence of individual-level data on assets and debts, and that improving how wealth is measured is a necessary first step toward policies that address inequality within households.
The wealth findings sit alongside a persistent gap on the income side of retirement.
Ontario's Pay Equity Office, drawing on Statistics Canada figures, put the gender pension gap at about 17 percent as of 2021, meaning women received roughly 83 cents for every dollar of retirement income men received.
That gap has barely moved since 1976, when it stood at about 15 percent.
The same office reported that among Canadians aged 35 to 64, 49 percent of women held less than $5,000 in savings, compared with 33 percent of men.
The consequences show up later in life.
In 2020, roughly 200,000 more women than men aged 65 and older lived below Canada's low-income cut-off.
An earlier, Quebec-focused study by Pugliese's team, published in 2023, gives a sense of scale on the wealth side specifically: it found men in the province's adult population held almost 30 percent more average net wealth than women, with the gap widening among couples.
