Women have protested for equal pay for years, yet improvements are slow at best. Photo / Getty Images
Women have protested for equal pay for years, yet improvements are slow at best. Photo / Getty Images
EDITORIAL:
Last night’s Census will give us a clearer picture of many facets of New Zealand life after a few years of pandemic-induced upheaval.
The tranche of statistics, once collated and refined, should provide a good barometer of how women in Aotearoa are living and working. More to the point,it may show how they are earning.
Question 52 on the individual form asked “In the last four weeks, which of these have you done, without pay?” It then offered categories such as household work; looking after a child or family member; helping someone who is ill or had a disability; and volunteer work for an organisation, group, or marae.
All of the Census questions are there for a reason, but this provides an interesting one to consider today, on International Women’s Day.
Prior to whatever changes Covid made to our working lives, New Zealand women were making painfully slow progress in leveling the ledger in being paid for their mahi.
Illustration / Rod Emmerson
It was calculated in 2001 that approximately 60 per cent of males’ work was paid, compared to almost 70 per cent of females’ work going unpaid.
Yet men and women spent similar amounts of time on productive activities (about 6.75 hours a day). Productive activities include labour force activities, household work, child and family care, purchasing goods and services, and community services.
In 2009/10, a Time Use Survey by Stats NZ found the average woman spent 4.3 hours per day on unpaid work and 2.9 hours on paid work, a decrease compared with 4.8 hours per day on unpaid work in 1988/89 and a slight lift from 2.2 hours on paid work.
Meanwhile, men spent 2.5 hours on unpaid work and 4.7 hours on paid work (compared with 2.8 hours and 4.2 hours respectively in 1998/99).
It could be said that New Zealand compares well, particularly with OECD nations, on the gender gap where women are paid 6.7 per cent less than men. But that is hardly cause for celebration among a people who take great pride in our early adoption of the vote for women.
The glass ceiling, too, is very real and robust. A report last year on business leaders across the Asia-Pacific region found New Zealand had more chief executives named David (four), than women (one).
Some cause for optimism, however, is the number of women who are living by the popular song and doing it for themselves. The number of self-employed women without employees increased almost 14 per cent to 143,500 in the year to March 2021.
This increase coincided with a drop in the number of women in paid employment. Although this drop was not statistically significant to data analysts, it could be a sign that some women are sick of waiting to be promoted, or to be paid at all.
International Women’s Day is a good time to reflect on why men in New Zealand are paid for most of their time while women still go unpaid for most of theirs.
