BY all accounts, the Quebec Federation of Women's 10-day March Against Poverty, which culminated in last week's rally in Quebec City, was a huge success. Indeed, six of the group's nine demands were met before the women even began walking.

Of these, surely the most significant was the announcement that Quebec would become the second jurisdiction in the world, after Ontario, to regulate private- sector wages according to the principles of pay equity, the doctrine that men and women should be paid the same, not only for the same jobs, but for different jobs of "equal value."

Whatever one thinks about this idea, it clearly involves a massive reordering of the labour market. Under pay equity, wages are a matter not merely for negotiation between employers and employees, but for adjudication by tribunals. Adjustments are made not to bring the supply and demand for labour into balance, but to reflect the relative value assigned to each job, at least where these are considered to be either "male-dominated" or "female-dominated."

Such a radical solution implies, at the very least, a radical problem: a severe and intractable imbalance between the wages paid to women and men, for which no less severe a remedy is sufficient; a degree of inequality that cannot be explained on any reasonable grounds, but only by a universal and almost transcendent discrimination. Proponents do not suggest this is overt, or even intended. Rather, it is explained as "systemic," the product not of individual prejudice, but of collective bias of which we may be wholly unaware.

So insidious a form of discrimination cannot be expected to go away all by itself. It must be pulled up by the roots. Nor can its existence be proved by reference to discriminatory acts. The evidence, rather, is the disparity in pay itself. The remarkable political success of pay equity as an idea is directly related to the widespread belief that there is such a wage gap; that is, a difference in wages between men and women that can be explained only by their sex. This is turn is based on a single, seemingly telling, calculation. In 1993, Statistics Canada reports, women working full time earned 72 per cent of what their male counterparts earned: $28,392, compared to the men's $39,433.

Even if we accept this kind of comparison, the numbers hardly suggest a permanent and unyielding crisis in women's wages: The female-male ratio in 1967 was just 58 per cent; as recently as 1988, it was 65 per cent. Indeed, while women's wages have increased by 21 per cent in constant dollars since 1975, men have had no real wage increase at all. The same picture emerges in hiring: While the number of women employed full time has risen by more than 1 million, or 45 per cent, since 1980, male full- time employment has remained unchanged. In other words, all the new jobs and all the wage increases over the past two decades have gone to women. Some crisis.

And that 72 per cent is simply an aggregate: it takes no account of genuine differences in the personal characteristics and work patterns of men and women. For starters, even women working full time put in 12 per cent fewer hours, on average, than men: 38.7 hours a week compared to 43.8. Likewise, because so many women have entered the labour market so recently, the necessary mathematical consequence is that men will have, on average, more work experience. Even the Ontario Pay Equity Commission estimated that only a quarter to a third of the wage gap was due to systemic discrimination - which is to say, the residual left over after a few such easily identified variables are factored in. Slice into the numbers a little more deeply, and the wage gap simply disappears.

There is no significant gap, for example, between single men and single women: Single women working full time earned 96 per cent of what single men earned in 1993 (in 1992, it was 99 per cent). The situation is much the same for new entrants to the labour force: Women under the age of 24 working full time earn 91 per cent as much as men of the same age. And while female university graduates overall earn only 75 per cent as much as male graduates, among more recent graduates, a Statscan study has found, the wage gap has closed. Indeed, single female university graduates working full time actually earn more than their single male counterparts: $40,024 to $39,342.

The significant predictors of wages, then, are not sex, but such mundane factors as age, education, and work experience. As women enter the labour market with more education - 55 per cent of current university students are women - and as they enter new occupations and work more years, the overall gap in wages is rapidly closing. All by itself.

The most striking "wage gap," indeed, is not between men and women, but between married men and everyone else. Single men earn much the same as single women, but both earn much less than married men. There would seem to be two ways to explain this. Either there is a vast unseen system of discrimination against single people, or else people in different circumstances - mortgage- burdened married men, for example, versus footloose bachelors - make different choices in life. Their jobs, and thus their pay, may simply reflect those choices.