Worth Fighting For
by Catriona MacLennan
The Battle to Bridge the Gender Pay Gap in New Zealand
When and if they are released, a set of reports on the pay and employment conditions for women in education sector are expected to boost a campaign for pay equity – by providing clear evidence of lower pay and worse conditions for women.
The Pay and Employment Equity Review Compulsory Schooling Sector Project Report was prepared in 2008 for the previous government, and the Pay and Employment Equity Reports (Compulsory Schooling and Kindergarten) were written in February 2009.
These documents are understood to show that female principals, teachers and school support staff are paid less than their male counterparts, and are passed over for promotion. However, the papers have yet to be publicly released.
Minister of Education Anne Tolley in May refused to release the 2008 document under the Official Information Act, stating that she had decided to release it publicly, and that it would be available soon.
The documents released to date consist of 23 pages, with approximately 21 ½ pages comprising only blacked-out typeface.
The first report referred to above – ie, from 2008 – was prepared by the Ministry of Education, the New Zealand School Trustees Association, the NZEI, the PPTA, the PSA and the Service and Food Workers’ Union.
The tripartite group investigated three questions –
*whether men and women received an equitable share of rewards
*whether men and women participated equally in all areas of schools, and
*whether men and women were treated with respect and fairness.
One of the few pages which was not blacked out states that the report identified many positive areas where pay and employment equity were in evidence. “It also identifies issues where it was perceived that, at least in some schools, a gender equity issue existed. These issues are not in disagreement. However, the description of the cause of the issue and the recommended responses are proving contentious.”
The document went on to say that it was likely that the parties would recommend that the minister consider pay investigations for cleaners and for teacher aides.
The documents from 2009 – the Compulsory Schooling and Kindergarten report – identified 17 issues where it was perceived that, at least in some schools, a gender equity issue existed. 51 recommendations were made, but these were also blacked out.
School support staff are overwhelmingly female, and many of them earn only 44 cents an hour more than the minimum wage of $12.50 an hour. They are among the hundreds of thousands of New Zealand women who work full-time but still take home considerably less money than male workers.
The Equal Pay Act was passed in New Zealand in 1972, with the aim of making provision “for the removal and prevention of discrimination, based on the sex of the employees, in the rates of remuneration of males and females in paid employment.”
Few women then would have imagined that, close to four decades later, there would still be a yawning gulf between male and female pay rates.
In 1975, women’s average hourly pay rate was 75 per cent of the male rate. 30 years’ later, in 2005, it had risen only to 86 per cent.
(Just how badly women are doing financially is even more starkly demonstrated by the median annual income figures over the 30 year period. In 1975, the female median annual income was just 55 per cent of the male figure, while in 2005 it was 69 per cent.)
The latest pay figures available from Statistics New Zealand are those from the March 2009 quarterly employment survey.They show that the average female weekly wage figure, including overtime, was $847.15 across all surveyed industries. The figure for men was $1042.05 – an extra $194.90 a week.
Examination of the average wage figures for the past six years shows that the pay differential has remained almost static. It fell to $192.40 in the March 2004 quarter, before rising to $202.88 in the March 2007 quarter, but remained close to $200 throughout the period.
The figures for Maori women are even worse: they earn just 86.1 per cent of the average pakeha women’s salary. What this shows is that no progress at all was made towards pay equity in those years and that, in some years, the relative position of women actually worsened.
So what is to be done about this ? Equal pay acts passed in many countries around four decades ago were designed to ensure that women were paid the same amount as men for doing exactly the same jobs. Prior to that, it had been both acceptable and legal to pay women less than men for the same work.
The Dunedin Tailoresses’ Union began campaigning for equal pay for women in 1897, and the National Council of Women and other women’s organisations continued the battle for 75 years until the Equal Pay Act was passed in 1972.
However, what rapidly became apparent was that major gender divisions in the workforce meant that women were still taking home far smaller average pay packets than men.
Almost half of New Zealand’s female workers are in occupations which have more than 70 per cent of women workers.
For example, in 2006 there were more than 210,000 employees in the public service and the public health and education sectors.
Women comprised 59.4 per cent of public service employees, and 80 per cent of the workforce in the public health sector.
More than twice as many women as men were employed in kindergartens, state and state-integrated schools, the Correspondence School, and tertiary education institutions.
Occupations which are female-dominated have, in many cases, had far lower pay rates than comparable male-dominated occupations.
In 2006, the gender pay gap for the public service was 16 per cent; while for the health sector it was 35 per cent.
The gap was 11 per cent in primary education, six per cent in secondary education and 22.2 per cent in the tertiary sector.
The concept of equal pay for work of equal value was accordingly developed to address that issue: that women should receive the same pay as men for doing comparable jobs involving comparable skills, years of training, responsibility, effort and working conditions.
One comparison often used is that of nurses and police officers.
Processes are developed for comparing similar occupational groups and measuring differences in pay and other employment conditions.
The Labour Government in 2003 set up a taskforce to advise on how the factors contributing to the gender pay gap applied in particular parts of the public service and in the public health and education sectors.
The taskforce produced a report titled Pay and Employment Equity in the Public Service and the Public Health and Public Education Sectors.
The document made five pages of recommendations, including –
*the government making a commitment to steady and measurable progress towards the goal of pay equity
*the establishment of processes and mechanisms to address the range of employment equity factors contributing to the gender pay gap in the public service and the public health and education sectors
*the creation of a dedicated Pay and Employment Equity Unit in the Department of Labour to oversee the implementation of a five year action plan
*a tripartite steering group, informed by pay and employment equity expertise, to lead and evaluate the implementation of the five year action plan
*the design and implementation of an audit and response plan process in the public service and the public health and education sectors
*establishment of a process for remedial settlements of pay equity claims
*creation of a tripartite process for developing core, minimum employment standards for pay and employment equity in the three sectors
*the development of a phase 2 action plan by December 2004 to reduce the gender pay gap and advance equal employment opportunities for employees of crown entities, SOEs, crown companies and employees whose work was funded by the Government through outsourcing contracts, such as cleaners and caretakers; and a tripartite process to consider the risks and benefits of a responsible contractor policy applying minimum employment standards to those receiving government funding.
The report also stressed the importance of the concept of pay equity being linked with that of employment equity.
“Employment equity” refers to the other factors which contribute to low female wages, including childcare responsibilities and problems in accessible cheap, reliable childcare; responsibility for parents or other family members; difficulties in accessing training; and discriminatory attitudes.
The Government responded to the taskforce in 2004 by creating the Pay and Employment Equity Unit and charging it with implementing the pay and employment equity plan of action.
The action plan set a key goal of ensuring that, by 2008, “genuine and durable pay and employment equity for women will be a feature of the New Zealand Public Service and public health and employment sectors, the gender pay gap in those sectors will have been significantly closed, and all practicable steps to close the gender pay gap will have been taken.”
That goal plainly was not achieved.
As the statistics quoted above show, the gap between male and female average weekly wages in 2003 was $197.11, while in 2009 it was $194.90.
Developments this year present even greater cause for concern about whether any substantial progress towards pay and employment equity will be made in the near future.
State Services Minister Tony Ryall in February announced the axing of two investigations aimed at improving the pay and conditions for female social workers at Child Youth and Family Services, and (the mainly female) school support workers.
Female social workers are paid 9.5 per cent less than their male colleagues.
Mr Ryall said that continuing with the investigations would “generate an additional form of remuneration pressure that is unaffordable in the current economic and fiscal environment.”
And on 13 May, Labour Minister Kate Wilkinson announced that the Pay and Employment Equity Unit would be dis-established as part of a reprioritising of government spending.
“The unit has worked hard researching the cause behind New Zealand’s gender pay gap and that work remains to be a valuable source of information,” she said.
“But, ultimately, achieving the goal of closing that pay gap can’t be realised by having a singular focus on the state sector. This issue is the responsibility of all employers and good employers will work to tackle it. Disestablishing the PEE will not mean women lose their voice on employment issues. The Government continues to receive advice from other groups such as the National Advisory Council on the Employment of Women.”
Those announcements appeared to confirm that the Government would not be proceeding with further initiatives on pay equity. However, confusion was created in June when Women’s Affairs Minister Pansy Wong announced that her ministry had received an additional $2 million over four years to do more research and policy work on the gender pay gap.
Ms Wong said that the money would help the ministry to provide “well-researched advice on the pay differential and other pay and employment issues”.
“The pay gap between men and women has been at about 12 per cent for the past decade and the Government is committed to addressing this issue and working towards closing the gap. One of the barriers is occupational segregation, which limits women’s employment choices. To achieve real change, we must ensure that women’s skills are fully developed and recognised – for the benefit of themselves, their families and for New Zealand as a whole.”
Ms Wong appeared to confirm a different approach from that of the previous government to pay equity when she went on to state that the money would be spent on “taking a fresh look at the causes of the gender pay gap and taking effective measures to reduce it,” although she did not spell out any details.
However, her reference to “occupational segregation” may indicate that she sees the path forward as lying in encouraging greater numbers of women into traditionally male-dominated occupations, rather than in progressing the concept of “equal pay for work of equal value.”
In Parliament on 18 June, Ms Wong was asked about what work she had directed the Ministry of Women’s Affairs to undertake to eliminate the gender pay gap.
She replied that she had asked the ministry to “take a policy role, in relation to the gender pay gap, that is broader than the pay and employment equity review and pay investigations. My ministry’s brief will address the following factors contributing to the gender pay gap: education qualifications; works experiences, including time out to care for children; and women being clustered in female-dominated, low-pay occupations.”
Ms Wong went on to say that “We will leave no stone unturned in trying to close the pay gap.” Questioned about what law changes the Government planned to deal with the issue, she stated that she was sure that her colleagues would consider legislative intervention if that was what was required.
She did not spell out what that might comprise.
A campaign has now been launched to press for pay and employment equity.
Labour MP Sue Moroney has started a petition calling on the Government to reinstate pay equity investigations in the public sector and to honour the results of those already completed. Rallies were held at Parliament and in Auckland on 30 June to protest at the scrapping of the pay equity investigations and the Pay and Employment Equity Unit, as well as the lack of progress towards closing the gender pay gap.
And the Public Service Association has filed a complaint with the Human Rights Commission alleging that the canning of the pay equity investigations is discriminatory and a breach of the Human Rights Act.
New Zealand is not alone in witnessing renewed calls for progress in closing pay gaps between men and women in 2009. A 2008 report commissioned by the International trade Union Confederation surveyed 63 countries and found that there were significant gender pay gaps, averaging 15.6 per cent.
The figures ranged between 13 and 23 per cent, with the differential in some cases increasing with higher levels of education. The response to the continuing pay gap has varied in different countries.
In the Canadian province of New Brunswick, the Pay Equity Act 2009 covers all public servants and requires that female job classifications be evaluated and compared with male job classifications on the basis of skill, effort, responsibility and working conditions.
In the United States, Wall Street brokerage firm Morgan Stanley in July 2004 settled a sex discrimination suit brought by the Government’s Equal Employment Opportunity Commission for US$74 million. The commission in its lawsuit alleged a pattern of discrimination that denied scores of women promotion and paid less productive men higher salaries.
However, despite the huge financial cost of the firm’s discriminatory actions, the message of the case appears not to have been heeded by other employers. The Institute for Women’s Policy Research has this year released a report showing that men out-earn women in nearly every occupation for which figures are collected.
In April, the Fair Pay Act of 2009 was introduced to address the wage gap between men and women for jobs of equal value. Congressional hearings are also being held into a GAO report examining the gender pay gap in the federal government.
The state of Wisconsin in June passed an Equal Pay Enforcement Act, but in the same month a Pay Equity Bill was defeated in Louisiana. In Australia, Western Australia has a larger gap between men’s and women’s wages than any other state. In the February 2004 quarter, Western Australian women employed full-time earned on average 22.6 per cent less than their male counterparts.
The national gender wage gap figure was 15.2 per cent. By November 2008, the Western Australian gap had widened to 27. 4 per cent, part of a 20-year-long increase. The Western Australian Pay Equity Unit was established in 2006 to address gender pay issues.
The picture is even worse for Australian women at the top of the ladder. Figures released this year by the government’s Equal Opportunity for Women in the Workplace agency show that women in chief executive officer roles earns 60.7 per cent less than men, those in finance positions earn 54.3 per cent less, and those in “other line or function” positions earn 68 per cent less.
And in Chile, it is only in 2009 that a law has been passed requiring employers to pay workers the same amount for equal work, regardless of gender.
However, back in New Zealand, it appears that the ball is in the Government’s court – firstly, to release the education sector reports and then to spell out exactly what it is going to do to put an end to the discrimination against women in pay rates, and in working conditions.
Catriona MacLennan is a south Auckland barrister, journalist and author.
ENDS
So, What’s new? The Tories true to their age-old form still continue to perpetuate the pay-gap between men and women and at the same time further marginalise Maori and polynesian women.The struggle continues on ad nauseum.
People ought to be paid for the experience, productivity and commitment to their job, not their gender. Research shows that men work longer hours than women and seek training, experience and promotion more fiercly. It’s also well know that women take a lot more time off work for the purpose of child rearing, and are therefore less productive and less committed workers. It’s not equality to pay a women the same amount as a man when a man will work more hours, take less time off and is more productive.
Chris, I suggest you are off point.
The question is whether men and women are paid the same for the same work and the same experience, as well as the same type of work and the same qualifications.
They are not.
As for your remarks about child rearing, suppose you add up the money you would pay to a nanny, a housekeeper, a taxi driver and a cook, including overtime (7 days a week, 52 days a year) at current rates. And if your childcarer multitasks, you will pay more for expertise. Check the going rates. Will you pay a woman more than a man?
Since children are supposed to be important, and the responsibilties demand a number of skills in nursing,nutrition, education, time management, management of people and resources, not to say budgeting, and last for many years, the woman who takes time out for child rearing may well be more employable and skilled afterwards, not to mention committed to her job with a family to support. Many an office contains a male “passenger” doing less work than women doing the same tasks. Yet he gets the promotion. Why? Could it be bias in the performance review process?
Research also shows that total hours worked, both at “work” (paid) and at home (unpaid) are more for women than for men. Indeed, if everyone was paid for the productive activities in the home, the statistics would weigh heavily in favour of women.
Furthermore,since the relative status of a job often depends on the genders of the people who do it, it will be interesting to see how the increasing proportions of female graduates in law and medicine affects the status of lawyers and doctors. Will their fields experience the same deterioration in job status that has occurred in teaching ?
Conversely, as nursing pay improves and more men take up this challenging career, will it become a higher status job in our society?
Perhaps the real question is, what is productivity? Or, alternatively, how do we assess the relative worth of jobs associated with women and those associated with men? Or, does a traditionally unpaid job become productive/worthwhile only if it becomes paid?
Great article. The issue of occupational undervaluing of female typed occupations is even fraught with manipulation of the pay itself such as in the case of social workers. The MSD Pay Equity reports were released last year. However, they procrastinated the Pay Investigation in the event it would be scrapped if a new goverment got in. Even so the investigation was well underway when this happened. The recent disestablishment of jobs in CYF/MSD will have an affect on female pay because most of those losing their jobs are women. There are no similarly paid roles for them to be absorbed into and they will therefore be expected to take lower paid roles if there are any around. The rough estimations of how much is lost to women over a lifetime of work shows it is comparable with the cost of a family home in Auckland maybe between $500,000 – $1,0000,000. As your article shows the female labour force can be easily “screwed” and no better time than in an economic recession when there are limited options and we are less likely to “squeal” loudly about it. After many years of research on this matter it is not hard to come to the conclusion that it is not the job itself that is undervalued but ‘gender’.
Of note is that the superficial ‘improvement’ in the gender pay gap from 197.11 in 2003 to 194.90 in 2009 is not due to improving female wages but declining male wages and conditions (Briar, 2009). The tertiary education sector has a 22.2 pay differential between men and women – one would assume that people who work in this sector regardless of gender are highly qualified/educated, and that if education/qualifications are indicative of a pay differential across sectors then one would assume that the gap would be smaller, not larger, in this sector. Women in tertiary education are also less likely than in other sectors to have children (Briar, 2009) – so time out to care for children is not a strong indicator of this disadvantage. Of interest is the fact that women tend to begin their careers on lower wages than their male counterparts (when child care and other family responsibilities are less likely to be a factor) and that this difference is pay increases, rather than decreases in the first 5 years (Briar, 2009).
Reference: Briar, C. (2009) Hidden Health Hazards in Women’s Work. Wellington: Dunmore Press.
People who believe that gender discrimination in the workplace does not exist and that achievement and reward are related to merit should read this book – they may find it enlightening to say the least.
Good article, Catriona. Thank you.
Great article – Catriona. It’s so helpful to understand the policy changes as they have occurred over the years. I agree with Ann that nursing is one to watch – with more men entering the care part of the sector, what impact will this have on pay rates?
As for Chris’s comments about women being less productive due to their work at home, I hope his wife doesn’t wash his socks for a month
It is indeed a good article. Would anyone like to suggest to Pansy Wong that she takes the simplest solution, and passes a law making it illegal to give men a pay rise for the next three years – given it is a recession, and all (we could possibly exempt men who are currently studying or unemployed).
Sure it is a brute force solution – but it is a brutal problem, and one that is insufficently well-acknowledged – I am afraid that only a brute force answer will do.
The simplest solution is to legislate to remove gender from all employment applications, contracts, negotiations. In other words change ‘female/male’ to ‘human being’. If the work is the same, then there is absolutely no right to give less pay to one person and more to another person.
The fact that the majority of men have shown no inclination to support women’s call for equal pay for equal work suggests that they are happy with the status quo.
Women therefore must force the changes themselves.
An updated well circulated essay by Marilyn Waring on the pay differences and paid/unpaid inequality of work value in New Zealand would be helpful.
Women are their own worst enemies the way they undervalue their input into this nation’s past, present and future.
The article covers a number of complexities and some of the underlying patterns are perhaps obscured. One factor that is often ignored is that generic social expenditure generally has less psychological priority to decision makers than specific economic or social outcomes where single outcomes appear obtainable (sometimes illusionary).
Secondly, most of our governments in the past 60 years have been relatively conservative, voted for by relatively conservative men and women – its your fault really. These administrations have in recent decades generally had a commitment to ‘less government’, or at least topical government. A side effect has been the giving of less in the way of payments to staff, unless they are to buy skills in demand – such payments are not immediately seen as ‘frontline’ by most of us. Bulk funding has increasingly lead to prioritisation and the margins have suffered.
Contemporary management theory is weighted towards the efficiency and strategic hierarchy model, in which ‘managers’ are paid more than ‘doers’ because their decision making ‘has more value’, and sometimes this is even true. Overall, since the 1980s the organisational approach in public and private sectors has shifted from the concept of increasing equity to one of structured inequity. The resulting gender inequity is likely to be a side effect, or co-lateral damage, than a deliberate policy outcome. People at the bottom, whether teacher support aids or nurses are not exempt. This is the accidental theory of life, located somewhere offshore between the stupidity theory of everything and the conspiracy theory.
Coming back to the central issue of why male teachers are paid more than women, one or two reasons given above hit the target – simply put, employment patterns for men and women are different, because they are sometimes seen as delivering a different product. More men have technical training, or deliver in traditional fields such as mathematics or technology, which are in demand. Proportionately more women have traditional teaching skills such as language and history, which are seen as nice to have, rather than cutting edge – not true but assumed by bureaucrats and politicians nevertheless, and one should have both edges. More women teachers work part time. More women than men are relieving teachers. Women tend to be the child carers during the children’s early years, so they take a break or a series of breaks. Men have suffered somewhat in the moral panic about males generally and therefore male teachers are desirable goods in the current market. Men are also less nice and likely to be more ambitious, and they are either expected to be the main bread winner or the only one during a significant part of their careers. The result is that men staying in the profession tend to be overtly ambitious and tend to succeed in pay negotiations because psychologically the stakes are higher.
While all these are generalisations there is enough truth in each to make a real difference in pay rates over time. Some of these factors advantage men and some disadvantage women – two different concerns. These factors have became relatively more important in the same period that formal pay equity was legislated for and have exercised a countervailing pressure on female pay rates, among other things.
I am sure that some gap filling is desirable, but I suggest that it is less important in the middle and higher teaching ranks, and it is arguably far more important (because more equitable) to plug the equity gaps for many low value workers who provide society’s shock troops – many of whom are women. They are the undervalued glue that sticks our society; often undervalued by their better off sisters, as well as by dastardly male policy makers and politicians. In my experience women at the top, or women aspiring can look after themselves if they have to, having had the education and social exposure to do so. A lot of gender equity focus should instead be on the wider question of equity, funding policy and where decisions are being made, all politically more scary topics. They are also by their nature, not single fix solutions, the love of which created the problem gaps in the first place.
Many commentators on this topic put forward the view that unequal pay for men and women in the same job is due to factors such as women taking time out of the workforce to care for children and use this to justify the pay gap.
The reality is that the very thorough pay reviews conducted in the core public service and education take this factor into account. They weed out the proportion this contributes to the pay gap and demonstrate that there is still a sizable part of the pay gap that is not due to this. This is the bit that is discriminatory and that the Government has an obligation to address.
The most common problem identified by the reviews was in starting salaries. Women new starters with the same (or more) levels of experience and qualifications as male new starters were offered less than their male counterparts and this gap is never caught up. All of this is not helped of course by our strange practice here in NZ of not publishing salary ranges for jobs.
The other main issue identified was performance pay systems where progression up the pay range is not transparent and is determined by managerial discretion. The reviews show that women with the same levels of experience and performance as men receive less salary progression and smaller one-off performance payments.
So, this has all been proven now. We don’t need to spend more taxpayers’ money on the Ministry of Women’s Affairs trying to figure out whether there is a problem. There is and the Government has both a moral and human rights obligation to fix it.
Personally, I haven’t seen this – the situation where men are being promoted or paid more than women.
If anything, I’ve seen the reverse – been turned down for jobs simply because I was male, or otherwise seen the ‘girls club’ where membership is required to ease the way. Certainly in my current workplace – a corporate environment working for a telecommunications company – opportunities for promotion are considered greater for women. This is an opinion commonly voiced by women in this company.
Some might think that Just – I recall the then head of Woman’s Refuge saying, in an interview with The Listener, suggesting that ‘maybe they [men] deserve it’, when questioned on ‘reverse’ sexism and bias.
Coming from a family with prominent and obviously strong and accomplished women, it came as a surprise to my younger self that anyone might consider them less able, or less deserving with regard to remuneration or recognition.
Meanwhile, it seems there are ample social mechanisms working to adjust the inequality discussed in the article.
A very convenient argument for women, I must say.
It reminds me of the 1970s when feminists argued that the very fact that boys out-performed girls at secondary level was undeniable “proof” of sexism. Funnily enough, we don’t hear that argument from women anymore. I wonder why? Maybe because girls now out-perform boys?
When the time comes – and it will – when women are paid more on average than men, this line of argument will be dropped like a hot potato, too.