Trapped by flexibility

By JANINE OGIER

If women want to get ahead at work they have to behave like men, says Aileen McColgan, an expert on pay equity and a professor of human rights law.

On a whistle-stop visit of New Zealand from Britain, she says that despite equal pay legislation being in place for almost 30 years, women there are still not getting paid the same as their male colleagues.

In New Zealand, research by Department of Labour economist Sylvia Dixon shows women might be narrowing the gap, but the gap is still there.

McColgan believes the key to furthering pay parity is a change in society, including cutting the extraordinarily long hours men tend to work.

Flexible work deals for all, especially for mothers, have to become an integral part of the work ethos, she says.

If a woman wants to avoid suffering significant discrimination in the labour market, says McColgan, then she should take short maternity breaks and return to fulltime work as soon as possible after having children.

But that's not advice she would counsel anyone to take.

"If you take significant time out, which may be the best thing to do for your children, you will suffer disadvantage as a consequence, particularly if you are not in a predominantly female career," she says.

The difficulty is that it's women who take most advantage of the flexibility allowed, not men.

"So you have a danger there of entrenching sex differences around child care, which then entrenches sex differences in employment," she says.

The real danger is that this is reinforcing the differences between men and women in the workplace, she says.

In recent years McColgan has come to believe crucial cultural changes need to be made to cut working hours.

As men work longer (a 60-hour week is typical), there is unfair comparison with women, who can't compete while juggling child care, managing the home and working fewer hours.

"It may be pie in the sky in terms of political possibilities, but it seems to me that the most important thing that anyone could work towards is actually reducing everyone's hours of work," McColgan says.

In Britain, pressure for a shorter working week is directed at extremely reluctant politicians and business leaders.

PriceWaterhouseCoopers' partner Suzanne Snively, who chairs the National Advisory Council on the Employment of Women, says nobody knows all the answers, but overseas experience has to be adapted to New Zealand.

From a positive perspective New Zealand is a much smaller country so there's more direct contact and impact on policy-making, Snively says. For instance, three Government ministers, the State Services Commissioner and the head of the Department of Labour were at last month's conference on pay and employment equity for women in Wellington.

The starting point for pay and employment equity for women has to be the public sector, Snively says.

She puts particular faith in the communication between the advisory council and policymakers, something that is possible in New Zealand because of our small and open system.

This month a new unit will be set up in the Department of Labour with the task of narrowing the gender pay gap in the public service, public education and public health sectors.

Its creation follows the report of a Government task force on employment equity issues, which showed that out of nearly 200,000 employees across the three sectors last year, the average ordinary-time hourly pay for women was $22.84 compared with $28.44 for men.

The latest Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development employment report analysis of hours worked per capita ranks New Zealand seventh, making us among the hardest workers in OECD nations.

So McColgan's comments about the effects of the usual 60-hour week for men in Britain are relevant here.

"What is happening in countries where there is a high work rate is that women are simply stopping having children," Snively says.

That has implications for the economy, such as how to pay for everyone's superannuation and to maintain a renewable work force.

"Today women in New Zealand haven't stopped having children, but given that work rate, I think we have to ask ourselves if we are heading in that same direction," Snively says.

One challenge in New Zealand is that many people are working that hard because they need to in a relatively low wage economy, she says.

"They don't want to hear about working fewer hours because they are frightened that if they work fewer hours they are going to earn less and they don't know how they are going to make ends meet if they do that," she says.

Work-life balance has been debated in New Zealand but the consequences of not changing the work culture haven't been looked at, she says.

New Zealand women perceive themselves as better off than women overseas because life here is laidback. And as they don't generally have long commutes there's more time to manage their home life.

"We all thought we were more flexible and had more time, but these OECD figures have really made me rethink," Snively says.

"I just wonder if we are not kidding ourselves a bit, that we have got this vision of this lifestyle that we once had, or that we think that if we work hard enough we might be able to have, but I don't think we have got it."

Businesses have to better use all human resources to reduce work hours and achieve work-life balance and, consequently, improve women's pay and employment equity, Snively says.

Improving productivity should mean that people earn as much money for fewer hours, she says.

In the 1990s businesses focused on cutting costs, but that was at the expense of working out how to maximise added value, Snively says.

Small and medium-sized businesses, which employ most New Zealanders, are frightened about how to retain their labour force, so they find it difficult to consider how to increase productivity.

So Snively believes there needs to be help from the Government to bring businesses together for such things as extra training for workers. Instead, the assistance they get generally just helps them with compliance.

"Maybe somebody [in Government] needs to give a little more thought into understanding that ultimately a business shouldn't be about the process of paying tax, but should be about how it can increase its productivity," she says.

Equal Employment Opportunities Trust chief executive Dr Philippa Reed says employers that help workers lead balanced lives benefit from improved productivity, commitment and loyalty. Regardless of the size of a workplace, work-life balance initiatives will be successful only if senior management support them and make use of them to balance their own lives.

NZ Work-Life Balance Project