The pay gap persists 50 years after the Equal Pay Act was passed. Photo / 123RF
The pay gap persists 50 years after the Equal Pay Act was passed. Photo / 123RF
Business leader Theresa Gattung is Damien Venuto’s guest on today’s equal pay focused edition of The Front Page podcast.
In a country with so many global firsts, we are still lagging behind on our gender pay gap.
Unless we have genuine equity in our workplaces, Aotearoa New Zealand will not be able to create a true sense of belonging where people are valued, remunerated, and represented equally.
New Zealand is getting close to equal gender workforce participation, with women now making up 47 per cent of our workforce. A trend is emerging towards more gender-equitable board appointments, and we now have a majority female parliament.
However, while we appear to be moving in the right direction with diversity and inclusion in our workforces, gender and ethnic pay parity still has a long way to go. The gender pay gap is stagnant, sitting at 9.2 per cent and has barely moved in the past five years.
This means that from today, women in New Zealand are effectively working for free.
The current 9.2 per cent gender pay gap means that for every 365 days the average Kiwi man is paid for, the average Kiwi woman is only paid for 331*. From today (Monday 28 November) with 9.2 per cent of the year remaining, women throughout New Zealand are effectively working for free for the rest of the year.
The inequality is worse for women of colour. The gender pay gap for Māori and Pacific women sits at 15.7 per cent, meaning they effectively stopped getting paid on Friday 4 November.
Global Women is launching its #NoPayDay campaign today, its second year running, so we can have a conversation about what we can collectively do to drive change.
We are encouraging our members and networks to get people’s attention by symbolically ‘downing tools’ and putting their out-of-office notifications on to raise awareness of the gender pay gap.
Many governments in OECD countries have implemented pay transparency policies to help close the gender pay gap.
Eighteen out of 38 OECD countries mandate systematic, regular reporting by private sector firms on gender wage gaps. These countries include the UK, Australia, France, South Africa, Spain and Sweden.
In New Zealand, it has been illegal for women to be paid less than men for the same job since Equal Pay Legislation became law 50 years ago. However, a pay gap persists.
As advocated by our Global Women member, MindTheGap and the New Zealand Human Rights Commission’s Equal Employment Opportunities Commissioner, Saunoamaali’i Karanina Sumeo, we support transparency around gender and ethnic pay gaps.
Entrepreneur and businesswoman Theresa Gattung. Photo / Supplied
To create action this #NoPayDay we are urging organisations and individuals to focus on a few key areas which are contributing to pay gaps and take steps to address these. For instance, for businesses to be transparent from day one.
If salaries are kept secret this can result in people being remunerated different amounts for the same job and as such, fuelling systemic inequalities. A progressive step would be to advertise a role with a clear salary band.
You simply can’t solve what you can’t see.
Organisations should make a commitment to scrutinise and monitor any existing pay gaps and then make a plan to address them. Unless organisations are aware of their current pay parity status - when it comes to both gender and ethnicity - they cannot fully understand the changes that may need to be made.
It is only through analysing the data and exploring a nuanced approach that meaningful change can happen. Yes, some factors are well canvassed, such as women interrupting their careers to be the primary child carer, but there is much besides.
Occupational segregation exists where women are over-represented in lower-paid jobs and under-represented in higher-paid positions. The unexplained gender pay gap is probably due to harder-to-measure factors such as unconscious bias.
Transparency is key, and the coalition established by Global Woman, Champions for Change – made up of New Zealand’s CEOs and Chairs dedicated to championing diversity and inclusion in their organisations – is committed to publishing their gender pay gaps. What gets measured gets attention.
There is goodwill among many businesses to build a workforce that reflects and is inclusive of, the diverse communities of Aotearoa New Zealand. We now need the snowball effect.
I encourage organisations and businesses to join us in advocating to close the gender pay gap by supporting #NoPayDay from today and for the remainder of the year, so that collectively we can eliminate the gap.
- Theresa Gattung is the chair of Global Women. Listen to today’s edition of NZ Herald podcast The Front Page to hear Gattung’s take on how Aotearoa can better reach its commitment to gender equality.
* The gender pay gap of 9.2 per cent has been sourced from the Ministry of Women (Manatū Wāhine) using Statistics New Zealand figures. This has been calculated using median hourly earnings from main wage and salary when working out the gender pay gap. With a pay gap of 9.2 per cent - the average Kiwi woman is paid 332 days equivalent to 365 days for men. When comparing median hourly earnings for Māori women and Pacific women against earnings for all men, the gender pay gap is 15.7 per cent.
