Quebec women still carry more of the load at home and have smaller paycheques

Tashi Farmilo

A new provincial report confirms what many Quebec women already know: even though things are slowly getting better, in Quebec couples, women are still more likely than men to earn less, and the gap is widest for those who can least afford it.

The Conseil du statut de la femme, a government body that advises on women's issues, released the findings in April. The picture it paints is one of uneven progress.

More than half of Quebec couples now share earnings equally, which is an improvement from over a generation ago. But a third of couples still follow the old pattern, where the man earns most of the money, and in one of five couples, the woman has no employment income at all.

Age makes a significant difference. Women in their late thirties through their mid-fifties are the most likely to be on roughly equal financial footing with their partners. But for women 65 and older, the traditional picture dominates: six in ten of those couples still have the man as the primary or sole earner. Many of these women spent years working less, or not at all, often to raise children or support a partner's career, and are now living with the financial consequences of those choices.

Having children does not automatically push a couple toward the traditional model, but having three or more does. The report also finds that childless couples are more likely to be unequal than those with one or two children, partly because that group includes many older couples whose children have grown up and left home.

The sharpest finding is about money itself. The less a household earns overall, the more likely it is that the woman contributes little or nothing to that income. In the lowest-income households, it is far more common for the woman to have no earnings than for the man. The report does not say why, but the reasons are not hard to imagine: precarious work, lack of affordable childcare, and the persistent expectation that women absorb caregiving responsibilities when a family cannot afford otherwise.

Even among couples where both partners work, women across Quebec still earn about 90 cents for every dollar men earn, a figure that got slightly worse in 2025 compared to the year before.

For people in the Outaouais, there is some reason for cautious optimism. The area has the highest average hourly wages in Quebec, which analysts attribute to the large number of people working in the federal public service there. Federal employment comes with relatively strong pay equity protections, which may give women in the Outaouais a somewhat better foundation than their counterparts elsewhere in the province. Even so, the report does not break down its findings by area, so it is impossible to say how Outaouais couples compare specifically.

What the report makes clear overall is that financial inequality within couples is not a relic. It is present; it is common; and it falls almost entirely on women.