Alleging gender discrimination for the past two decades, Ontario’s 800 midwives are taking the provincial government to the Human Rights Tribunal this week over what they say is a significant pay gap compared to doctors.

The legal action, brought by the Association of Ontario Midwives (AOM), alleges that midwives have experienced a “gender penalty” in their pay, backing up that claim with independent reports concluding that the pay equity gap for their profession is about 50 per cent. Opening arguments before the tribunal begin Wednesday.

A report prepared for the association by independent pay equity expert Paul Durber in 2013 as part of its tribunal application says midwives — an almost exclusively female job — should be receiving closer to 91 per cent of a community health centre family physician’s salary, after reviewing the skills, working conditions and responsibilities of each profession.

“It is my opinion that sex bias is operating in the unequal compensation being received by midwives,” Durber said.

Top-earning midwives earned about $100,000 annually in 2013, according to Durber’s report, versus about $200,000 for family physicians.

“The purpose of the legal challenge was to address the ways in which the Ministry of Health and the Government of Ontario have actively participated in maintaining a significant pay equity gap for midwifery work,” said Juana Berinstein, director of policy and communications at AOM.

“We’re alleging that midwifery work is being undervalued by government because it’s women providing care to women for a women’s health issue, and that while government did a rough pay equity analysis when they first brought midwifery into the health care system in 1994, they didn’t maintain pay equity over time.”

Midwives are trained and licensed by the province. They care for mothers and babies from conception until six weeks postpartum. They typically handle 80 births a year and are on call around the clock for their clients.

The Ministry of Health did not return the Star’s request for comment on Tuesday.

Former Health Minister Deb Matthews said at the time the AOM filed its application to the tribunal in 2013 that funding for midwifery services had increased fivefold since the Liberals came to power in 2003, and that midwives’ pay had risen 33 per cent.

“Our government remains open to working with midwives on ways to further enhance their profession and their role in our health care system,” she said in a statement in 2013.

Berinstein at the AOM pointed out that while increases were made to midwives’ salaries in recent years, their salary was also frozen for 17 of the 22 years that midwifery has been regulated in Ontario, leading to the pay gap.

“The government is talking of being willing to address the pay equity gap in Ontario, but they’re not addressing it for midwives and they’re spending tax dollars fighting us at the tribunal,” she said.

When the government was in the process of regulating midwives in the early 1990s, a consultant determined that their compensation should fall slightly below that of the male-dominated job of community health centre family physician, but above that of the female-dominated nurse practitioner position, according to the AOM’s application.

But the association is alleging that after midwives began working under regulation in 1994, the government ceased to engage in any pay equity analysis, and that “very substantial” pay equity gaps started to appear in 1997.

Katrina Kilroy, a Toronto-based midwife and president-elect of the Canadian Association of Midwives, said midwives are not demanding to be paid the same as physicians. They’re asking for fairness.

“We’re just asking to be treated the same way, to have the same rights as other public sector workers, to be paid fairly and not to have a gender penalty on our pay just because they can get away with it,” she said.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

“We have a provincial government that’s doing gender equity consultations across the province, and yet has refused to engage in any kind of pay equity analysis with the most female-dominated profession in the province, and that just seems highly hypocritical,” she said.

With files from Andrea Gordon