Pay Equity (yep, still banging on about it…)
Tell you what would be handy right now - that money women are not being paid because the government cancelled pay equity claims last year.
We know the numbers. The gender pay gap here means women earning the median wage get $25.36 less each week than men. The ethnic pay gap is worse - for wāhine Māori, it is $58.40 less a week; for Pacific women it’s $76.40.
This is because work historically performed by women - caring, teaching, cleaning, administration - has been systematically undervalued compared to male-dominated occupations which require comparable skill, effort and responsibility.
Think of what women could be doing with those dollars we're owed - at the petrol pump and the supermarket. Family tax credits are great for workers who have kids, but no use to people without kids, or people who have kids but aren’t able to find work. I worry about them – they still need to get the kids to school, do the supermarket, go to job interviews.
It’s increasingly tough to get by. I know from talking with my daughter – single parent, full-time teacher – that the numbers don’t add up. Once she’s paid rent, there genuinely isn’t enough left for her little family. And the rising cost of petrol – and goods which rely on petrol to be delivered – is making it worse.
So it seems even more of a shame now that the government suddenly changed Equal Pay laws, scrapping all 33 active pay equity claims affecting 180,000 women. Like I say, tax credits may help working families, but wouldn’t it be better to just pay women properly?
Pay equity has so often been framed as a future “cost” to businesses who employ women, but it is worth remembering that pay inequity is a current cost to those women. We are the ones who aren’t being paid what we’re worth according to comparators that objectively measure the value of work.
What is too rarely talked about is the huge benefit pay equity would provide not just to individual women but to whole communities, with money flowing into households where it would be spent on food, power, petrol and other consumer goods.
Plus we’d all benefit from better services from sustainable workforces, and from our country keeping workers instead of losing them offshore for better pay.
There is hope. There’s a Member's Bill to make it compulsory for large businesses to report their pay gaps – and research tells us this would drop pay gaps by 20-40 percent.
Aussie businesses have been reporting their gender pay gaps to a government agency for a decade, and publicly for the last two years. This has led to more employers making serious efforts to analyse, understand and act on their gender pay gaps.
Here in Aotearoa, 95 percent of our businesses already collect the data needed to report and have HR systems that can automatically calculate gaps. There’s a cool group called “Champions of Change”, a network of more than 80 leading businesses, and they’ve made public reporting of gender pay gaps a requirement for membership.
All of this would deliver more than any tax cuts or benefits, and ease the cost of living for hundreds of thousands of families.
We can see where it has already worked - by 2023, settlements had been reached for nurses, midwives, care and support workers. For many, the pay increases were life-changing. There are stories about women who could finally afford to have their grandchildren for the holidays because they could buy food for them.
It doesn’t seem like a lot to ask.