Canadian Wage Inequality over the Last Two Decades.

We study the dispersion of wages of full-time full-year workers over two decades controlling for both education and experience. Applying non-parametric statistical methods we find statistically significant and large increases in inequality for males with low levels of education and experience coexist with more modest changes in inequality for older, more experienced workers with a university degree. These relative patterns tend to be similar for females though with a stronger tendency towards inequality in each education-experience category. Given the recent focus in this debate on the issue of polarization, we also show graphs of the actual distributions of wages and analyze these to conclude that the groups experiencing increased dispersion do display what is commonly known as polarization though it would be an exaggeration to claim that the jobs in the middle of the distribution have vanished.