Canada’s Gender Wage Gap Is Even Bigger for White-Collar Freelancers

Canada’s gender wage gap — the difference in average earnings between men and women — is well documented. But that gap is even bigger for white-collar freelancers, a new report suggests.

Financial technology company Remitly used data from the freelance networking platform Upwork to compare the rates of more than 58,000 freelancers across the world.

In a report published in May, the company identified a 19 per cent gap between the freelance rates charged by women and those charged by men.

In Canada, women’s average hourly freelance rates were 16.2 per cent less than men’s.

Ankur Tiwari, vice-president and general manager of Remitly Business, said he hopes that shedding light on average freelancer rates can empower individual freelancers to charge fairly for services.

“This is a benchmark,” he said. Freelancers “can look at the rates of their role in our data and can adjust their rates.”

Katherine Scott, a senior researcher with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, said that while there was little data on freelance wages and gender, she wasn’t surprised by the report’s findings.

“It's a really important snapshot of what has been an important labour market trend,” she said. “Women are generating lots of economic activity and getting ripped off and exploited in their labour.”

Canada already tracks the difference in average wages between men and women. In 2025, according to Statistics Canada, women aged 15 years and older earned on average 88 cents for every dollar men earned. The gap is slightly larger in B.C., where women earned on average 85 cents for every dollar men earned.

This inequity is largely attributed to years of discrimination against women in the workplace that have created barriers to equal participation. These barriers include a persistent under-representation of women in trades, spotty pay transparency laws across provinces and inconsistent access to child care.

But Scott said Canada does not yet have deep-level data on freelance rates and gig worker pay rates.

That’s partly because freelance work and gig work can be more complicated to track, she said. It could be someone’s full-time occupation, or a side hustle. People on exchanges like Upwork could be competing with freelancers in other countries, where labour regulations, tech regulations or the cost of living might differ.

Freelancers also may negotiate rates per project or per employer, which can vary based on their experience, their relationship with the employer or the complexity of the project.

“Statistics Canada is still struggling with this issue,” she said. “So this type of study really helps paint a picture.”

Tiwari said many freelancers and their clients were using the company’s software to send and receive payments. Before launching a special product aimed at freelancers, the company wanted to better understand “pain points” in the industry, he said.

Remitly identified the rates of freelancers with at least 100 billed hours on Upwork, which is mostly used for white-collar work, such as graphic design, coding or legal work. Upwork does not require users to list their gender on their profile.

To compare rates, the team used Gender API — a software that determines a person’s likely gender based on their name, geographical location, government data and regional name variations — to determine the probability that each freelancer is male or female.

With that data, the team analyzed only users who had a more than 90 per cent likelihood of being either a man or a woman. In the report, the team acknowledges that due to the limitations in the data, they couldn't compare rates for those who identify as non-binary or another gender.

Finally, Remitly compared the average hourly rates of men and women across countries and industries. It found that in Canada, women charge about $47.78 per hour for freelance work while men charge $57.

The job with the highest freelance wage gap in Canada was regulatory compliance professionals, who ensure company policies align with government laws. For that position, the gap between men’s and women’s freelance rates was 56.9 per cent.

Tiwari added it was notable that worldwide, the roles with the highest wage gaps were for highly technically skilled jobs, such as AI and data engineers — positions that saw pay gaps of about 25 per cent, according to the Remitly study.

“These are the jobs that Canada is betting its economic future on,” he said.

By industry, finance and accounting professionals across the world saw the largest gender pay gap of 26.1 per cent, followed by administration and support freelancers at 23.6 per cent and legal freelancers at 21.4 per cent. The study found that design and creative professionals had the lowest wage gap, at 9.3 per cent, followed by engineering and architecture professionals at 13.9 per cent.

Globally, across all freelance positions, Thailand had the biggest pay gap with men making 51.7 per cent more than women. Croatia had the smallest gap, at 0.3 per cent. The study included 54 countries.

Canada landed right in the middle of the list, between the United States at 16.9 per cent and the United Kingdom at 15.4 per cent.

Tiwari said it’s sometimes hard for individual freelancers to know what others are getting paid. He hopes the data can help freelancers understand standard rates in their industries.

He recommended that freelancers find information about pay rates in their industry and look for communities of other freelancers to fill that “information gap.”

Meanwhile, the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives’ Scott said the gap is less about freelancers’ individual tenacity in asking for higher wages. Instead, she said, the report hints at the larger systemic reasons why companies expect to pay women cheaper wages.

The study “leaned into the idea that women are undercharging,” she said. “But it’s important to understand that there are structural issues there, that it's not just women having low self-esteem.”

Here in Canada, she said, classifying freelancers and gig workers in law and bringing them under employment standards legislation could be a first step towards breaking down the freelance wage gap.

“We have to rethink the tools that exist for the type of work that is emerging, like gig work, or self-employment,” she said. “These are a very particularly vulnerable group of workers to exploitation. It behooves us to rethink some of our old ways of approaching things.”