Ian Blair: Equal pay can help bring more women into engineering

We need more women coming into engineering and we need to ensure that there are opportunities for them to flourish and progress. Photo / 123RF

COMMENT: One of the things that attracted me to the design and engineering industry 12 months ago was the profound need for change. We have a massive transformational challenge ahead of us in balancing diversity of thought and ensuring that women and men are treated equally and presented with the same opportunities.

Because at the moment that's just not happening. We are not a diverse industry and my organisation, WSP Opus, isn't diverse. Yet. To be fair, we're representative of the engineering industry in New Zealand where this is the norm: 12 per cent of the members of Engineering NZ are women and 9 per cent are technical leaders. Consequently, our frontline workforce is only 26 per cent female.

But it's 2018 and our workforce should be representative of the clients we serve, and we should also be rewarding people fairly for doing the same work at the same level of performance in like-for-like roles. To do otherwise just isn't right.

I want to work in an organisation where everyone feels they fully belong. I'm also a father to two sons and two daughters and simply cannot imagine living in a world – or being part of a leadership team of an organisation – where I have to tell my daughters that they get paid less than their brothers because of their gender.

There's no one thing that's going to fix this, but the obvious starting point was to close the pay gap.

Earlier this year we instigated a programme of work to understand and address any pay gaps within WSP Opus. Early analysis showed approximately 20 per cent difference in pay between female and male employees.

This difference can be explained by having more male employees in higher progression level roles and relatively low female representation in the industry as a whole. Obviously this needs to change and is something our sector needs to tackle collectively and plan for long term.

However, when we compared female and male employees in similar roles we found the pay gap was approximately 7.5 per cent, and this was the gap we wanted to close. So how did we do it?

Where a pay gap existed and the cause was not something readily apparent such as part-time hours, we worked with the manager to identify the reasons for it. In the majority of cases there was a reasonable explanation and the gap could be attributed to causal factors.

But we also found cases where a portion of the gap was not explainable and this portion of the gap was deemed unreasonable. Where an unreasonable gap was identified we have corrected the gap through a remuneration adjustment.

All up, 60 employees, 3 per cent of the organisation, were identified in this analysis as being underpaid — 55 females and 5 males.

It's a great start, and one I'd urge all organisations to take a bold stand on, but it's only the beginning. We need more women coming into engineering and we need to ensure that there are opportunities for them to flourish and progress.

I'm heartened to see change is under way. WSP Opus is one of the founding partners of Engineering NZ's Diversity Agenda which has a strong focus on encouraging women to consider engineering as a career. This year the University of Auckland announced that a record number of women have enrolled to study engineering with women making up 27 per cent of first-year students.

This diversity of talent changes things. Last year 36 per cent of our graduates recruited were women and next year this will increase. Diversity fosters innovation and creativity through a greater variety of problem-solving approaches, perspectives and ideas and it should be celebrated.

Our clients expect innovation from us. But are we truly innovative if we aren't celebrating diversity? We've delivered some astonishing things - by challenging ourselves to tackle diversity we will deliver even more.

• Ian Blair is Managing Director of WSP Opus.