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WHY ARE WOMEN STILL WAITING 100 YEARS ON?
Theresa Gattung
SEPTEMBER 2018 MARKS 125 YEARS SINCE WOMEN in New Zealand were first given the vote via the Electoral Act of 1893. Indeed, since women anywhere in the world were first given the vote. How impossible that must have seemed! But Kate Sheppard, leader of the franchise campaign, was a remarkable woman. Her intellect, her charm, energy, determination and networks all led to this.
During the final year of the 14-year campaign to secure suffrage, having been disappointed on at least two previous occasions when it seemed that Parliament would pass the Bill, she and her colleagues in other regions assembled a petition signed by 25 per cent of all women then living in New Zealand, and rolled it out in Parliament. The document was 274 metres long.
When the Bill eventually passed on 8 September, there were only six weeks to go before enrolment closed for the forthcoming election. In a time when it took days to get from Christchurch to Auckland, Kate and her colleagues again achieved a seemingly almost impossible feat: by the time the rolls closed, 109,461 women had been enrolled out of a total adult female population of 124,439. Absolutely incredible. All women could enrol to vote — not just wealthy women, and not just white women.
Meri Mangakāhia was the leader of the Māori women’s campaign to gain suffrage in the Māori Parliament. Descended from three hapū (sub-tribes) of Te Rarawa and well educated, Meri married Hāmiora Mangakāhia. He was the founder of the 1889 Kotahitanga (‘unity’) movement, which expanded its tribal rūnanga (council) in the early 1890s to form an intertribal Parliament.
When Hāmiora became premier of the Lower House in 1892, Meri attended the May 1893 session with him and formed a committee with other wives of the movement’s leaders as a forum for debate. She was asked to present a petition on their behalf to the Speaker of the Lower House regarding their inclusion in the proceedings of the House. The first woman to address the Parliament, she asked that women be given the right not only to vote but, going a step further than the suffrage petitions in Wellington to Parliament at that time, also to become members. Indeed, at that time many Māori women landowners had superior rights to their Pākehā sisters in the inheritance and disposal of lands. Her motion was a catalyst for the formation of Nga Komiti Wahine (Māori women’s committees) throughout the country, and her efforts to gain suffrage represented a strong interest by Māori women in having a political voice and organising collectively. Approximately 4000 Māori women voted in the first elections in 1893, but it took until 1949 before Iriaka Rātana was elected as the first Māori woman MP.1
No goal that we Kiwi women today could possibly imagine is impossible to achieve, in the face of what the women who lived in New Zealand and went before us have achieved.
After Kate and her colleagues secured votes for women in 1893, they identified their next highest priorities as pushing to allow women to become MPs, which took a further 25 years. Other goals included the economic independence of married women, the right for women who were divorced to retain custody of their children, and equal pay for work of equal value. Today, we are still waiting for the latter.
ON 1 SEPTEMBER 2017, STATISTICS NEW ZEALAND announced that the gender pay gap was 9.4 per cent. It had been 9.1 per cent in 2012. It has reduced since 1998, when it stood at 16.3 per cent, but essentially progress has stalled in recent years.
In March 2017, the Ministry for Women released research which showed empirical evidence of the gender pay gap in New Zealand and looked at its causes. Only 20 per cent of the gender pay gap is explained by differences in education or occupation, or the fact that women are more likely to work part-time. The other 80 per cent is driven by ‘unexplained factors’. (So the next time someone says to you that the difference is explained by men and women working in different industries, or women taking time out for child-rearing, challenge them. This is simply not the case.)
Commissioned by the Ministry for Women, the March 2017 work was carried out by Gail Pacheco, Chi Lai and Bill Cochrane from the New Zealand Work Research Institute, Auckland University of Technology and the University of Waikato. It was the first empirical evidence gathered in New Zealand since 2003. What, then, are the likely key factors influencing the pay gap?
Only 20 per cent of the gender pay gap is explained by differences in education or occupation, or the fact that women are more likely to work part-time. The other 80 per cent is driven by ‘unexplained factors’.
Differences in behaviour, particularly men’s more aggressive negotiating style, could account for some of the differences in pay, but so could a difference in the way employers have treated women who tried to negotiate. For example, research from Australia found that, while women are willing to negotiate for pay, men are more likely to get a pay increase when they negotiate, from which it can be inferred that employers in general treat women and men differently.
This research also found that the relative size of the gender pay gap increases for female employees on higher incomes. There is a smaller gender pay gap between male and female employees on lower wages, perhaps because lower-paid occupations have narrower pay bands, therefore less scope to pay men and women very differently. The gap widens to approximately 20 per cent among those on the highest wages.
While the World Economic Forum’s 2016 Global Gender Gap Report ranked New Zealand ninth out of 144 countries, it showed that we fell in the gender parity stakes, from seventh place in 2006.2 During those 10 years we also experienced significant drops in every subcategory, and for working mothers the situation today is worse. Statistics New Zealand data released in February 2018 shows there is a clear motherhood penalty, with dads earning 17 per cent more than mums.
In her wonderful book We Should All Be Feminists,3 Chimamanda Adichie points out that if we see the same thing over and over again it becomes normal. And as Aunt Lydia points out in The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Attwood, that which does not seem normal today will seem normal as time goes on if it becomes our reality. If we keep seeing only men as heads of companies and as leaders, it starts to seem natural that only men should be heads of companies. But as Adichie has pointed out, the person more qualified to lead is the more intelligent, the more knowledgeable, the more creative, the more innovative. There are no hormones for these attributes. A woman is as likely to be as intelligent, innovative and creative as a man.
We do not value women having an equal seat at the table in business, in large business in particular. The April 2017 New Zealand Census shows that just 22 per cent of board roles in the top 100 companies are held by women. And 25 per cent of those 100 companies have no women on their boards at all. In January 2018, the NZX released its Annual Diversity Report, showing that the number of women on listed company boards rose from 17 per cent to 19 per cent in 2017. The percentage of women directors of listed company boards has increased just seven percentage points from 12 per cent in 2013 when the NZX started to report this data.4 At the top 10 largest listed companies nearly a third of directors are women, perhaps indicating that media attention and shareholder/community pressure has had an impact. In the small-cap index of 2017, only 13 per cent of companies had female directors, and 32 listed companies did not have a single woman on their boards! Late in the same year, the NZX introduced a new corporate governance code stipulating that, as part of their reporting requirements, all listed companies either have a diversity policy or explain why not.
In comparison, female directors on Australia’s ASX increased from 22 per cent in 2015 to 26 per cent in 2017. Still glacial progress. We have evolved; but our ideas of gender have not evolved very much, it would seem. On 14 November 2017, TVNZ’s Hilary Barry highlighted the gender pay gap, tweeting, ‘Dear women of NZ, I’ve got some bad news for you. From today until the end of the year you’re working for free.’
Women are paid less than men in every country in the world, with one exception. In January 2018, Iceland became the first country in the world to enforce equal standards, paying men and women equally for jobs of equal value. This does not rely on an employee proving she has been discriminated against. Instead, the burden is on companies to demonstrate that their pay practices are fair. All company and government agencies with 25 or more employees must demonstrate that they pay men and women fairly without gender discrimination.
Iceland is already a leader in gender parity. Indeed, the World Economic Forum ranked Iceland the top country for gender equality since 2009, based on criteria involving economics, education, health and politics.5 The pay equality law was passed — perhaps not coincidentally — a year after female candidates won nearly half the seats in Iceland’s Parliament and with a youngish feminist, Katrín Jakobsdóttir, as prime minister. The new legislation won support from Iceland’s centre-right government as well as the opposition. This is surely significant for New Zealand. In order to ensure long-term sustainability, it is important to achieve cross-party support on this matter in New Zealand, just as we have on other important nation-building endeavours, such as Treaty settlements.
Women are paid less than men in New Zealand because we all accept it. Ultimately we are all part of the system, and to overcome problems in complex systems we need to take concerted action; and yet there has been no progress on closing the gap in recent years. We must show leadership in our own hiring choices, and we need comprehensive pay equity legislation. Companies should commit to measuring the problem and making structural and systemic changes. Equal pay for jobs that are of equal skill, responsibility and stress should not be controversial. Gender should be a payroll reporting requirement, with staff allowed to request access to this information at an aggregated level.
This is hardly revolutionary. Norway, Sweden and Finland have had income transparency in place for some time. And in Britain businesses with over 250 employees have been obliged since April 2018 to disclose what they are paying in salaries to their male and female staff. A number of companies did so ahead of the deadline; some of these, including Virgin Money and SSE, found in uncovering the gender pay discrepancies a commitment to do something about it.6 Here in New Zealand, the public sector has demonstrated leadership, with the State Services Commission publishing the gender pay gap data of government departments, and the sky hasn’t fallen in.7 The private sector should be required to have greater pay transparency as well. There has been too much secrecy in the workplace for women to find out whether they are being paid less for doing the same job. After all, what gets measured gets attention.
Something that has changed since Kate Sheppard’s time is the rise and rise of entrepreneurs. Arguably the globally most admired business person is no longer the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, but someone who has built their business from scratch. This seems all good until you look at the psychology surrounding it. Investors want the next ‘unicorn’, or billion-dollar company, and if that is the only focus, then it can lead to the rise of unscrupulous companies with cultural problems. The entrepreneurial space is no more likely to treat women well and pay them fairly than the traditional corporate arena.
There has been too much secrecy in the workplace for women to find out whether they are being paid less for doing the same job.
Pay equity really hit the headlines in New Zealand during 2016 because of the Court of Appeal decision in Terranova Homes & Care Ltd v Service and Food Workers Union Nga Ringa Tota Ltd, also known as Terranova v Bartlett. That decision held that the Equal Pay Act 1972 required equal pay for work of equal value (pay equity), not simply the same pay for the same work. This changed the way the Act was previously understood to have applied.
The government’s response to this was two-fold: to settle the dispute by increasing the pay for lowly paid (predominantly female) care workers, and to establish a joint working group (JWG) on pay equity principles to provide the government with recommendations. The JWG was asked to recommend principles that were consistent with the Equal Pay Act and the Court of Appeal decision in the Terranova case. That is, that equal pay for work predominantly performed by women is to be determined by reference to what men would be paid to do the same work, abstracting from skills, responsibility, conditions and degrees of effort as well as from any systemic undervaluation of the work derived from current or historical structural gender discrimination.
Established in October 2015, the JWG met on 10 occasions and agreed a set of pay equity principles and a process. Attending the JWG discussions were senior officials from Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) and the State Services Commission (SSC), representing the interests of the state sector and the wider economy. The union parties were led by the New Zealand Council of Trade Unions (NZCTU), with representatives from the Public Service Association, and E Tū, FIRST Union, the New Zealand Nurses Organisation (NZNO) and the New Zealand Educational Institute (NZEI). The employers were led by Business New Zealand with other representatives. The recommendations, which were reported back to Paula Bennett and Michael Woodhouse on May 2016, were signed by Dame Patsy Reddy (facilitator), Richard Wagstaff (NZCTU), Phil O’Reilly (Business New Zealand), Paul Stocks (MBIE) and Lewis Holden (SSC).
Leaving aside the observation that the representatives of each of the employment organisations were all men, and noting also that the scope of the JWG’s terms of reference was limited by the government’s brief, it is nevertheless my view that this ‘agreement of principles’ would be a useful starting point for capturing some of what is required to implement comprehensive pay equity legislation in New Zealand. In addition, we need to go back to Green MP Jan Logie’s member’s bill and adopt the principle of income transparency, as is now being implemented in the United Kingdom.
In late January 2018 the new government announced its intention to introduce pay equity laws by mid-year, and to reconvene the JWG under the leadership of Minister for Women Julie Anne Genter and Workplace Relations Minister Iain Lees-Galloway. The group would include the NZCTU, business leaders (including Business New Zealand and the Employers and Manufacturers Association) and government representatives, and be facilitated by company director and agribusiness leader Traci Houpapa. At the time of writing, it remains to be seen whether the government will rework the Equal Pay Act 1972 — which, after all, gave us the Terranova case — or whether it scraps that and starts again with new, trail-blazing legislation. The current law requires that when a man and a woman do the same job they get paid the same amount. Whatever option is chosen, we mustn’t lose the clarity of this straightforward principle in any new legislation. After all, pay equity does not need to be a complex matter.
Pay equity involves looking at, and resolving, the difference in pay between men and women at similar levels or pay bands in an organisation (same-level gender pay gaps) as well as the difference in pay between men and women doing similar work (like-for-like gender pay gaps). It is essential for pay equity to be demonstrable and transparent, and for all interested parties to have ready access to adequate information resources to assist them in their deliberations.
Some people, usually men, talk about pay equity being impossible to sort out because how do you compare work of different occupations in terms of skills, experience, and so on? This deliberately ignores the fact that we demonstrably do not have pay equity either in New Zealand or elsewhere. In January 2018, Carrie Gracie, the China editor for BBC News, publicly resigned her post, angry at what she described as a broadcaster’s illegal pay discrimination. In October 2017 in Australia, Lisa Wilkinson, host of the Today show, left Channel 9 after revealing she earned almost A$1 million less than her male co-host.
Of course, women in the media who are willing to go public will get their story out because they are in the media. It’s not so easy for those in less conspicuous roles. Nor should the process require women to go to the courts or to walk out of their job in order to obtain redress. We will not be treating women fairly if we make this an individual claim-driven process. We should take a leaf out of Iceland’s book and put the onus on the employer, not the employee. More importantly, we need to eradicate the pay gap so that such walkouts are not necessary in the first place.
As the largest employer in the country, the government is well placed to develop and showcase good practices in all aspects of employment. Women, after all, are now holding more than 45 per cent of public service senior leadership roles and 43 per cent of board roles. Pay equity in New Zealand is not, however, going to be achieved solely by role-modelling in the public sector; it is going to require intervention that impacts on the private sector, and it must go further than merely producing documents with suggested actions and leaving it at that. Such documents exist, and their guidelines — lead from the top, analyse your data, make a plan, redesign your talent management processes, maximise female talent, normalise flexible work and parental leave for men and women, be aware that we may all have unconscious bias — are an excellent framework. And we have just begun, through the White Camellia Awards and similar initiatives, to celebrate companies that are leading in this area. But it is way too ‘softly, softly’ and way too little.
We can start at the big end of town with corporates who could never claim they couldn’t afford such measures, or that they wouldn’t be able to collect such data, or that it’s simply impossible because they don’t have enough people of different genders in different roles. Of course some businesses will protest. But many will get with the programme — look at the White Camellia winners in recent years. The 2016 supreme winner was ANZ, and the category winners were Westpac, BNZ and Sovereign. The 2017 supreme winner was Simpson Grierson, and the category winners KPMG, Westpac, The Warehouse Group, Coca-Cola Amatil and the Far North Safer Community Council.
The rest of the world is also getting with the programme. At the 2018 World Economic Forum (WEF) annual meeting in Davos, Canada’s prime minister Justin Trudeau made pay equity and equal opportunity a central theme of his address to heads of business and state. Appealing to their economic instinct, he spoke out for ‘hiring, promoting and retaining more women. Not because it’s the right thing to do, or the nice thing to do, but because it’s the smart thing to do.’ Addressing the pay gap would, he explained, boost Canada’s economy by billions of dollars. But he added that it would take ‘effort, leadership and a willingness to change the nature of work as we know it’.8
Trudeau backed up his rhetoric with clear proposals: review parental leave policies; improve child benefit; promote women to senior roles; introduce women-only recruitment quotas; be transparent on numbers; take action against sexual harassment; and more. He drew attention, too, to intersectionality, pointing out other forms of discrimination faced by women in the workforce, such as race, religion and socio-economic status. All of these proposals should become mandatory measures in any initiative in New Zealand to narrow the gap.
IN SEPTEMBER 1993, MARKING THE CENTENARY of women’s suffrage in New Zealand, Dame Catherine Tizard, who was then Governor General, spoke at the unveiling of the Kate Sheppard sculpture in Christchurch. ‘May Suffrage Centennial Year have the transforming result we wish for — that New Zealanders formulate and share a vision of what equality between men and women would involve and together affirm its profound benefits.’9
When we think of the Kiwi women who fought for women’s rights we tend to think of Kate Sheppard and the campaign for suffrage, and do not pay sufficient attention to the thread of struggle that leads us to where we are now.
Margaret Sievwright, one of Kate Sheppard’s strong supporters and central to her work to bring about suffrage, was a passionate idealist who wanted total equality for all women: economic independence for married women, equal pay, sex and parenting education, and the reform of marriage and divorce laws. Once the vote was won in 1893 she formed the Gisborne Women’s Political Association, with the aim of educating women in how to use the vote effectively and influence legislation. She was a founder member of the National Council of Women in New Zealand in 1896, and became one of its first vice presidents, then president in 1901–05. Her only daughter, Wilhelmina, married Kate Sheppard’s only son, Douglas, in 1908. Before her death in 1905, Margaret was dismayed to realise that the momentum for political activism was slowing. ‘The apathy and cheerful indifference of the great majority is distinctly benumbing,’ she noted, and correctly predicted that it would be a long, hard struggle to rebuild it.10
We are the women (and some men) today continuing that momentum.
As I write in 2018, 125 years since suffrage, we have another redoubtable woman as Governor General: Dame Patsy Reddy, Crown facilitator of the previous government’s joint working group on pay equity. How fitting it would be for her to sign into law New Zealand’s first comprehensive pay equity legislation. We have the perfect inflection point in New Zealand at the moment. We have a Green Minister for Women, Julie Anne Genter, and we have a Green Minister for Statistics, James Shaw, surely not a coincidence, and a feminist prime minister in Jacinda Ardern. The new Labour Government has told Statistics New Zealand it has to measure New Zealand’s gender pay gap. Personally I am not convinced we need to measure this again, although measuring something is usually the first step towards paying it attention and sorting it out.
In 2018 it is totally unacceptable that men and women in the same occupation are not paid the same, and that work of equal value is not paid for equally. New Zealand is a country that values treating everyone equally. It matters to us. Let’s fix this.
1 Jill Pierce (1993). The Suffrage Trail: A guide to places, memorials and the arts commemorating New Zealand women. Wellington: National Council of Women.
2 World Economic Forum (2016). Global Gender Gap Report 2016. Retrieved from http://reports.weforum.org/global-gender-gap-report-2016/rankings/.
3 First given in 2012 as a TEDx talk, Adichie’s essay was adapted into a book published in 2014 by Fourth Estate.
4 The New Zealand Herald, 27 January 2018.
5 https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/11/these-are-the-world-s-most-gender-equal-countries/.
6 The New Zealand Herald, 28 April 2017.
7 7 December 2017. Retrieved from http://www.ssc.govt.nz/2017-public-service-workforce-data-published
8 Anna Bruce-Lockhart (2018). Justin Trudeau Tells Davos to Call Time on Women’s Inequality. World Economic Forum, 23 January. Retrieved from https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/01/justin-trudeau-davos-women-first/.
9 Pierce, The Suffrage Trail.
10 Ibid.