Women ‘working for nothing’ from this week

Source: Radio New Zealand

New Zealand women start working for nothing from this week.

Although the country’s gender pay gap improved this year, campaigners say there is much work to be done to bring pay equality for New Zealand women.

Still Minding the Gap spokesperson Jo Cribb said for every $1 earned by a Pākehā man, a Pacific woman would earn 79c, a Maori woman 82c, an Asian woman 84c and a Pākehā woman 93c.

Cribb said this would be the week that all women started working for nothing. “It’s going to be four weeks of nothing.

“Research shows women’s education levels, occupation or experience account for less than 20 percent of why there is a pay gap.

“What is driving around 80 percent of gender and ethnic pay gaps is decisions made within organisations about pay and promotions – that is, unconscious or conscious bias. Pay differences based on performance are justified. Pay differences based on gender or ethnicity aren’t justified, and that’s what we are focusing on.”

She said the government should introduce mandatory pay gap reporting. Labour’s spokesperson for women Carmel Sepuloni has introduced a member’s bill that would require large employers to report pay differences and include pay in job ads.

“Should 61 MPs support it, we could have it very soon,” Cribb said.

“There is clear overseas evidence that when businesses are required to report their pay gaps publicly it drives meaningful action and has seen national gender pay gaps drop by 20 percent to 40 percent.”

Stats NZ said in August the pay gap this year was 5.2 percent, down from 8.2 percent a year earlier.

‘We also need a fair and consistent pay equity process’

But Equal Employment Opportunities Commissioner Gail Pacheco said the reduction could be because fewer lower-paid women were in work.

“The gender pay gap is obviously only for those that are employed… which means that if more low wage women have become unemployed in recent times because of our economic downturn, that artificially brings the pay gap down.”

Pacheco said requiring companies to report on pay gaps helped to close them over time. “We also need a fair and consistent pay equity process. The recent amendments of the Equal Pay Act made it much harder to ensure we get those fair outcomes for pay.”

She said structural drivers of the gap also needed to be addressed. “Things like making flexible working normalised and available at all job levels, strengthen parental leave for fathers and partners to share the care load – and reduce any bias or discrimination that could be occurring in the workplace.”

Pacheco said some organisations did not think they had a pay gap until they looked closely at the data.

“It could be that maybe there’s no gaps in like-for-like role. But there’s an organisational wide gap because not enough women are making it through the hierarchy within the organisation.”

Council of Trade Unions national secretary Melissa Ansell-Bridges said the gap had only dropped this year if it was calculated on median pay, not mean.

“They’re both useful to look at in conjunction, but if you’re going to pick one, we generally look at the mean and that pay gap is still 8.7 percent.

“It’s hard to know all the factors but it’s most likely that the reason that the median pay gap had decreased by a couple of percentage points was that you were seeing a lot of movement in the middle … you’re seeing the impact of the tail end of previous public sector pay increases under the last Labour government that were a bit higher than what you’re seeing now.

“It also means it’s probably a high water mark because those drivers are no longer happening.”

Cribb said all European Union nations and more than 50 percent of OECD members, including Australia and the UK, were introducing measures aimed at reducing gender pay gaps.

“We know times are tough for a lot of New Zealand businesses, so the government could choose to only mandate public pay gap reporting for businesses over a certain size and provide for a long implementation time to acknowledge the challenging trading environment. A tool already exists on the Ministry for Women website to help businesses work out their gender pay gaps and what action to take to close them.”

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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand