Got the skills, got the degree, but not the salary

By JAN CORBETT

In the 20 years that 38-year-old Linda had been working for the same corporation she has watched as younger men have been promoted ahead of her.

This year she thought her time had come.

Although she now has a senior manager's role, Linda (not her real name) applied for further promotion to head office. She was told they were looking for someone with leadership skills and, because she had led teams of people before, she knew she had no problems there. With no family commitments, she also knew there were no issues about moving to a new city.

Assessing the field of applicants, she thought her only real competitor for the job was a slightly older woman.

So you can imagine the quiet fury with which she questioned her superiors when she found the job had gone to a younger man with technical, not leadership, experience.

Of course they did not like being challenged over their decision, which is why so few women take that step.

In her reflective moments she could see it made better business sense to appoint someone who didn't have to be relocated to fill the job and who would have been made redundant otherwise. He was the less-expensive option.

And she is still prepared to believe there are opportunities with this company, which is why she has asked to remain anonymous. She has decided to be even smarter in how she plays the game.

To be sure she doesn't miss out next time, she is studying for her MBA with, she says, a number of other women who like her have hit the glass ceiling and are ensuring they have all their armour in place next time they get the chance to smash through it.

But she admits her commitment and loyalty to the company have waned.

When lawyer Frances Joychild was working for the Human Rights Commission, she remembers how her telephone would ring about once a fortnight with an inquiry from a woman executive in a large company who had discovered a male colleague of the same or even more junior rank was either being paid more or being offered training or promotion opportunities not extended to her.

These women "were hurt, depressed and demoralised", says Joychild. But they seldom laid formal complaints for fear of the long-term repercussions, the least of which would be having to resign.

Linda says she would never lay a complaint because "it's a small network and you need these people to give you a reference".

Stories like this go at least some way to explaining why, a full 30 years after it became illegal to pay a woman less than a man for doing the same job, women still earn less than men.

Certainly this situation is not unique to this country. In Britain, for instance, women on average earn 82 per cent of what men do.

But the Census statistics showing women's median income for the year to March 2001 was $14,500 and men's was $24,900 do little to explain what is going on for individual women in the income stakes.

That's because some of that gender pay gap can be explained by the average being dragged down by women who choose to work part-time, or not at all, or take less demanding roles for family reasons.

When Statistics New Zealand did further research into the gender pay gap it found hours worked was a significant factor, although there is no accompanying research equating the number of hours spent at the office with productivity or effectiveness.

The more telling gap is the disparity in the hourly income rate - women's is 84 per cent of men's - but that, too, can be attributed to women taking jobs that pay less than men's.

And jobs that women have traditionally done are invariably undervalued relative to men's traditional jobs. For instance, nurses and primary school teachers not only pay for their own training but are paid far less than police, who are paid to train. A first-year nurse begins on around $24,000, a teacher $29,000 and a new constable $46,000.

The most astounding statistics instead come from university graduate surveys showing, for instance, that male commerce graduates start out in their careers earning on average nearly $5000 more a year than women of the same age with the same qualifications. And we're talking about women in their early twenties who are unlikely to have family demands piling on them just yet.

Trudi McNaughton, executive director of the Equal Employment Opportunities Trust, refers to these results as clear evidence that the gender pay gap is not just about women taking time out to have children. She admits some of it might be explained by the type of jobs women graduates take.

But just as often "it's to do with gender stereotyping in pay negotiations".

From her discussions with male employers McNaughton has learned that when male job applicants demand more money they are viewed as just the sort of ambitious person the organisation needs. "But if women negotiate hard, a number of male managers have told me they find that intimidating.

"If women get a negative response when they're assertive about salary it's not surprising they don't go for the top dollar in employment."

Consider the surveys comparing men and women of similar age in similarsenior positions. Executive recruitment company Sheffield released one in July showing executive women were earning 80 per cent of the amount
their male counterparts took home. And the older the women are, the greater the gap, suggesting ageism as well as sexism, according to Sheffield principal Simon Hart.

Young women who therefore think equality is almost theirs have yet to see what happens to them as they age.

While younger women in the survey of 1200 are earning 96 per cent of what the men earn, women aged over 55 are earning only 65 per cent of the men's salaries.

Yet 43 per cent of the women executives have postgraduate qualifications, compared with only 27 per cent of the men.

While Hart says his consultants have not seen gender pay discrimination at the time an executive is appointed, "clearly something happens down the track".

Hart thinks it may be that women are spending fewer hours in the office, but are working at home after the children are in bed, unseen by their superiors. Or it may be that they are not pushy about pay like the men. But as Trudi McNaughton has already pointed out, that's a losing strategy for women too.

From her experience of interviewing eager young job-seekers, Maureen Eardley-Wilmot, past-president of Business and Professional Women and the co-owner of a city-based computer forensics firm, has seen that last factor in action.

She describes how a young woman will apply for a job with the firm, say she is earning $28,000 but is prepared to drop to $25,000 to get the job.

The male applicant will announce that he expects to be paid $35,000. If the firm wants to hire the young man, it will usually offer him $30,000. He will most likely accept, "but he'll let you know he expected $35,000 and that you're lucky to get him". The woman will be grateful to have been offered the job.

"It's incredible that we're still seeing these gaps," says Hart, who sees the need for more research to discover exactly what is going on. The explanation could be that women executives simply do not perform as well as the men, but he doubts it.

It could also be that women simply do not know what men are being paid.

Frances Joychild believes the Privacy Act and the decline of collective bargaining have counted against women. The only way they find out what others are being paid is by chance.

Joychild cites a case she was involved in four years ago where a senior woman executive discovered from a fax that a man more junior to her was being paid $15,000 more. The employer's argument was they had to pay a premium to get a man to work in the particular area.

But she says official complaints like these are rare, because women have too much to lose by getting on the wrong side of their employer. Those who seek redress through the commission tend to be the young and unskilled with no other option and nothing to lose.

Simon Hart says the only executive group where there is pay parity is human resource managers - a female-dominated niche. He thinks weight of numbers has levelled the field. Or it could be that they know most about salary scales.

Career coaches say pay and conditions are two topics that women don't gossip about enough.

Trudi McNaughton agrees, and says it can be worse where women are in the minority at work and not part of the office social networks like the regular crowd who drink after work or play rugby together.

Such informal information networks can be more available to men than women.

Not only does the rise of individual employment contracts and the demise of collective awards make it more difficult for women to assess their market value, but, according to Food and Service Workers Union general secretary Darien Fenton, the shift to a casualised workforce has made workers at the bottom of the heap more vulnerable to exploitation - and they tend to be women and more likely Maori and Pacific Island women.

Not only is there a gender pay gap, but an ethnic one as well, meaning these women suffer a double whammy. In some cultures, says McNaughton, it is not acceptable to seek reward on your own behalf.

Fenton says her own rise through the union movement to CTU vice-president has been a struggle achieved through "sheer bloodymindedness and the support of other women".

She says she battles with that old bogey that "you're not womanly if you're tough". And because unions were forced to retrench during the last decade, many of the middle-management jobs held by women went, leaving "a log jam of men at the top".

Apart from the basic injustice of women in comparable jobs earning less than men, it will ultimately lead to a burden on all taxpayers, according to the newly formed Women In Super organisation.

It wants not only to encourage women to save for their retirement, but to change the way superannuation schemes are structured to reflect the fact that women with children have breaks in their earning years, or lose the benefits of their spouse's policy if the relationship ends.

These issues for women clearly transcend class boundaries.

So what are women supposed to do when being submissive doesn't get them anywhere and being assertive gets them even less?

One piece of advice is to find out as much about the market rates and phrase your demands as being in line with those, rather than as a statement about your personal worth.

Talk to a recruitment agency and get them to do some of that work.

Trudi McNaughton's advice is to seek out jobs with companies that are EEO members and make it clear that's why you want to work for them.

Fact file

* Women comprise 47 per cent of the labour force.

* Sixty per cent of women are in the labour force compared with 74 per cent of men.

* In the year to March 2001, women's median income was $14,500, men's was $24,900.

* Half as many women (12 per cent) as men receive income from self-employment.

* There is a high concentration of women in occupations offering part-time work like the health, community services, hospitality and sales industries.

* Thirty-seven per cent of European women in paid employment work part-time compared with 35 per cent of Maori women, 31 per cent of Asian women and 29 per cent of Pacific Island women.

* The 1999-2000 Time Use Survey shows men and women do the same amount of productive work, but men do more paid work.

* According to the International Labour Organisation out of 41 countries New Zealand has one of the highest percentages (37 per cent) of women legislators, senior officials or managers.

* An Equal Employment Opportunities Trust survey for 2001 shows women comprise 29 per cent of the three top management tiers in private enterprise, up from 25 per cent in 1998. In the public service they comprise 33 per cent of upper management.

* Only 15 per cent of company directors are women.

* Women's predominance in nursing and teaching means they are more likely than men to be classified "professional".

* Thirty-five per cent of women said they had looked after a child in the same household in the four weeks before the 2001 census, compared with 27 per cent of men. That applied to 71 per cent of women aged 35 to 39 years but to only 55 per cent of men in the same age group.

* Women are twice as likely as men to do unpaid minding of children from other households.

* jan_corbett@nzherald.co.nz

Read the rest of this series:
nzherald.co.nz/nzwomen

nzherald.co.nz/employment