TORONTO - A new study says women in Canadian tech jobs, with a bachelor's degree or higher, earn nearly 20-thousand dollars less a year than their male counterparts.

It says that pay gap can be just as stark for visible minority and Indigenous tech workers.

The Brookfield Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Toronto's Ryerson University crunched 2016 Statistics Canada census data with methodology based on the U-S O..Net system for skills breakdowns.

It found a $19,750 pay gap between female and male workers with a Bachelor's degree or higher, with women averaging $75,500 a year, compared with $95,100 for men.

Executive Director Sean Mullin says the numbers pop out at you.

He says an almost 20-thousand-dollar gap between men and women with the same degree in the same profession is still a pretty significant thing and we as citizens, should aspire to be better than that, and to fix those types of disparities.

The report defines tech workers as people either producing or making extensive use of technology, regardless of industry.

Brookfield says there were about 935-thousand Canadians working tech occupations in 2016, representing 5.1 per cent of the Canadian labour force.

When all Canadian tech jobs are examined, regardless of education, the pay gap shrinks to $7,300 with men earning $76,200 annually on average and women earning roughly $68,900.