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 spokeswoman Jo Cribb said for every $1 earned by a Pakeha man, a Pacific woman would earn 79c, a Maori woman 82c, an Asian woman 84c and a Pakehā woman 93c.
This would be the week all women started working for nothing for four weeks.
“Research shows women’s education levels, occupation or experience account for less than 20% of why there is a pay gap.
“What is driving around 80% of gender and ethnic pay gaps is decisions made within organisations about pay and promotions — that is, unconscious or conscious bias.”
The government should introduce mandatory pay gap reporting, Ms Cribb said.
Labour’s spokeswoman 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,” Ms 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% to 40%.”
Stats NZ said in August the pay gap this year was 5.2%, down from 8.2% a year earlier.
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.”
Requiring companies to report on pay gaps helped to close them over time.
“The recent amendments of the Equal Pay Act made it much harder to ensure we get those fair outcomes for pay.”
Structural drivers of the gap also needed to be addressed.
This included making flexible working normalised and available at all job levels, strengthening parental leave for fathers and partners to share the care load, and reduding any bias or discrimination that could be occurring in the workplace.
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 — which “is still 8.7%”.
The median pay gap had most likely decreased because of “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.”
Ms Cribb said all European Union nations and more than 50% of OECD members were introducing measures aimed at reducing gender pay gaps.
“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.”
By Susan Edmunds
