Feminist Election Stuff - Women's Choice & Vote Equal Pay

Two big Auckland opportunities coming up in August

Women's Choice Election Forum - 7th August, 7pm, University of Auckland
Held every three years, an opportunity to hear the major parties debate on women's issues.

Facebook event for all the latest info and to share/invite others.

Chair will be Judy McGregor, stalls for organisations and cool stuff (eg Women's Bookshop) before hand, and reps from

• Labour - Jacinda Ardern MP
• Greens - Jan Logie MP
• NZ First - Tracey Martin MP
• Maori Party Cinnamon Whitlock (Ngapuhi, Ngati-Kahu ki Whangaroa, Te Rarawa) 
• Mana Party - Tracey-lee Repia · (Ngapuhi, Ngati Porou, Uenuku nga Iwi) 
• National - Erica Stanford

Vote Equal Pay March & Rally - 12th August, 11am, Britomart
Organised by the Pay Equity Coalition, a chance to show your support for pay equity and also hear from political parties on how they will tackle the gender pay gap.

Facebook event for updates and to spread the word.



Do feel free to email me about any other relevant feminist election stuff julie dot fairey at gmail dot com to promote and share :-)

Rage post about the gender pay gap: warning contains ALL CAPS

So there's new local research out today that the gender pay gap is a) real and b) primarily due to conscious and unconscious bias.

Firstly YES.

And also: it is good to have this in the public arena and being discussed, and for the Minister for Women to accept the findings as opposed to going "but we really need more research to be sure".   It is a victory for all those good folks who have been fighting to get this issue looked at on the facts, for many years now.

Because it is undeniable, it really is, that there is a gender pay gap.  There has always been a gender pay gap.  It was a little smaller a few years ago (went down to 11%, now back up to 12%) but it has ALWAYS BEEN THERE.

And yet people have sought to deny it, explain it away, it's because women want to be paid less, take time out for children, aren't as qualified as men, don't need as much income because the man of the house is the breadwinner.  WRONG.

And we knew these dismissals were wrong.  Lots and lots of us.  Not just from lived experience or from observing others around us but from the other many ways that workplaces, and society, treats women as less than men apart from pay, and from statistics, and from court cases and union agitation.  WE KNEW THIS ALREADY.

A little digression about "conscious and unconscious bias".  Can we please just call it what it is?  SEXISM.  That's what you call it when people are intentionally or unintentionally discriminating against women, individually or collectively, because they are women.  It's sexism, it's always been sexism - even the other explanations (now proven to have had only a small impact) like time out for childcare, taking jobs with lower responsibilities, not asking for promotion or pay increases blah blah blah all have a basis in sexism.

So how do we stop sexism, vis a vis the gender pay gap?  Apparently we need to raise awareness.

This is the point at which I start to get a certain song from That Bloody Woman (NSFW lyrics) stuck in my head.

See para 5:  WE KNEW THIS ALREADY

Yes, it probably will help, and it will give the many many organisations that ALREADY KNEW THIS new strength to push for implementation actual practical measures that will close the gap and treat workers fairly.

But excuse me for a moment while I rage inwardly against the people who only now see the truth that was there the whole time, and pledge to eliminate this Awful New Injustice They Had Never Heard Of Before Today.

I heard someone on the radio saying there is a strong business case to pay women fairly.  Of course there is, there always was.  Just as there are strong economic arguments to support the Living Wage, paying teachers more, showing that cleaners bring more value to society than hedge fund managers.

Again, WE KNEW THIS ALREADY.

Because businesses who get to pay lower wages save money in the short term.  Anyone who has ever worked in the union movement or a strongly unionised workplace will be able to tell you this -  for too many in management and above keeping the quarterlywage bill low is seen as essential, even when it undermines longer term benefits like staff retention, and increased productivity.

The tyranny of a corporate approach (in government too) that demands the lowest possible wage bill, and the lowest possible number of staff, will continue unless we ACTUALLY MAKE IT STOP.

That means legislation folks, not just raising awareness.  LAW CHANGES, sweet sweet law changes that make it necessary to STOP paying people less based on irrelevancies like gender identity and race.

We've asked nicely for pay equity for many years.  We've even asked assertively and with facts, like men do (eye roll).

CAN WE JUST DO THIS ALREADY?  (PLEASE)


I don't do comments anymore.  You can find me on Twitter or FB under juliefairey.

Guestie: Who is Kristine Bartlett?

Many thanks to Rebecca Matthews of the Pay Equity Challenge Coalition for permission to re-post this from their blog:

An important legal case can put a previously unknown individual into the spotlight and maybe even make them a household name. It can also be a way for one person to symbolise the experience of hundreds of thousands of others.

Get to know the name Kristine Bartlett. Because this brave and hard-working Lower Hutt caregiver is the new face of the campaign for fair pay for low-paid women and for women’s work to be paid fairly when compared to jobs men do.

The Service and Food Workers Union Nga Ringa Tota is taking a case that aged care employers and the Government that funds them are in breach of the Equal Pay Act 1972 because of their failure to address the very low pay rates in the sector.

The union member at the centre of the case, Kristine Bartlett, is a long-term caregiver at Terranova Homes and Care. She says her hourly wage of $14.46 is less than what would be paid to male employees with the same, or substantially similar skills. Only six of Terranova’s  117 carers are men.

The new case is an historic opportunity to prove that female dominated care work is undervalued and underpaid as was so convincingly demonstrated in the Caring Counts Report.

This case heralds a new approach in the fight for equal pay and pay and employment equity in New Zealand.

The case has been referred to the Employment Court from the Employment Relations Authority. The Pay Equity Challenge Coalition has been accepted as an intervener by the Court. The status of interveners is a watching brief and they may possibly make extra submissions to those of the claimants.

Living Wage opinion piece, and the responses

Last Friday the Herald published an opinion piece I had submitted arguing for a living wage.  It was my 2012 aim to submit an op ed and I finally managed it, albeit two days into 2013 ;-)

TLDR; the main point of my argument is surely no one's labour is worth less than it costs them to produce that labour (i.e. to live).  In the many comments on the article and conversations I've had with people online and off on this matter I have never encountered a proper refutation to this; indeed it's almost always ignored.  Take for example this opposing opinion piece published in the Herald three days after mine. 

It's been an interesting experience, writing for a different audience from The Hand Mirror and watching how the response has been almost completely divorced from the blogosphere.  Not a single murmur on any blog that I've seen about the living wage discussion which has taken place quite heatedly on the Herald website across two opinion pieces now.  I've had people take the effort to ferret out my council email address and send me their thoughts, and contact from people I haven't seen for years except vaguely online telling me their mother told them about it.  Quite a different experience from the often hyper-critical environment online. 

Finally, I want to give a big thank you to Deborah Russell of A Bee of a Certain Age and The Lady Garden, who inspired me to do this.  I will be trying to do it again. 

The stubborn gender gap - the Market is not providing

Bad news on the gender pay gap today, as reported in the NZ Herald:

The gender pay gap is the biggest it has been in 10 years, according to new data from Statistic New Zealand.

The quarterly employment survey shows the gender gap has increased in the year to September by 1.3 per cent, from 12.85 per cent to 14.18 per cent.

Pay Equity Challenge Coalition said it was the biggest gap it had seen in a decade.

Contrary to the delightful picture the Herald have chosen to illustrate their story (a white man and a white woman, both in suits, arm-wrestling) the gender pay gap is not a zero sum game, where men will lose out if women gain, and it is also not predominantly the concern of those in the higher paid roles where suit-wearing is expected.  In March 2009 I wrote a longish post about what I see are the reasons for the gender pay gap.  I'm not going to rehash that again here, because I agree with our guest poster from March 2010, Rebecca Matthews, who wrote then:

It seems to me that there are too many people, and particularly in this government, who use further research and analysis as a shield to hide behind, because they actually don’t view the gender pay gap as a problem and don’t want to commit to doing anything about it..

The only people who have ever made real progress towards pay equity for women, or indeed for other group disadvantaged by not being older middle-class or above white men who appear straight, have been workers' groups and movements led by those who deserve the improvements.  Employers do not magnanimously pass on fair pay, they only do it when they are forced to.  This is why we have a minimum wage; because otherwise employers would pay some people below it and as a society we have decided that is not fair. Some employers are fair, that's true, but they don't appear to be the majority, and the Market doesn't encourage that behaviour.

In other areas we have significant gender gaps too - particularly in political representation of women and appointments to boards.  Talk about quotas has been slowly building for some years, in response to the inability of political parties and organisations to deal with it voluntarily and effectively.  I used to be pretty anti-quota; I thought that it would undermine those women appointed or elected.  But, having heard from Judy McGregor on the topic, I've changed my mind. 

It is not as if there is a shortage of women who would be good in senior roles, on boards, as political decision-makers.  Indeed there is some contention that more women on the boards of major financial institutions may have meant we didn't end up with all that global financial meltdown stuff.  Without a TARDIS, I don't feel I can say for sure.

The shortage is instead in the area of those willing to appoint women.  And if they won't start doing it, despite all the evidence of the value of diversity at the decision-making level, and decades of working to change attitudes, then maybe it is time to regulate.

A response to the Can't Feed Don't Breed Brigade

On Monday the NZ Herald started a week-long series looking at the gap between rich and poor in Auckland.  On the first day they examined two families - one well-off and one struggling.  The first had two kids, 10 and 13, the second three children, all aged 3 and under.

The article was widely shared online by leftie progressive types I follow and I was startled by some of the responses, particularly on the issue of the struggling family including three children.

Comments such as these were made:

"Agree though that life is all about choices and looking at the big picture of deciding to have 3 kids (and another from a prior relationship) to support when not in a strong enough financial position points to perhaps the wrong choices being made along the way."

"I agree that an average worker should expect to be able to support a family on average pay, but three or more kids I think is pushing it. You shouldn't enter into a situation you can't afford to maintain, that's irresponsible in my view."

When did we decide that having three kids constitutes a large family?

In the whole of human history there has been a massive period of time with average family sizes of more than 3 children born to one couple.  In many countries in the world now women are likely to have more than two children over the course of their fertile years, indeed the world average fertility rate is a bit over 2.5 on all three measures Wikipedia lists.   Why is it unreasonable to expect to be able to have three children and be able to get by in Aotearoa New Zealand, a comparatively well-off place to live?

What also bugs me is how, like with so many issues that come up through a feminist prism, this is about pretending that you know more about someone else's life than they know about it themselves.  Second guessing the life choices of others is a game I'd rather not play.  There could be many reasons why people have 2< children (or indeed any children, one child, no children).  Maybe there was a contraceptive failure, or cultural pressure to have a big family, or a desire to have children of different sexes, or they had the financial resources at the time of conception, or any range of other reasons that are theirs and not yours, or mine.

And what's are the assumptions made by those saying the equivalent of "you shouldn't breed more mouths than you can feed"?  

• People's financial situations don't change over time - or at least they don't get worse.
• Someone can totally foresee how much more each child will add to their outgoings.
• Contraception is fool-proof and freely available and widely used and not socially, religiously or culturally discouraged for anyone.
• Abortion for economic reasons is legal and accessible.

None of these is an accurate assumption.  Taken together they in fact look quite ludicrous, and the last one in particular I find quite chilling.  Those advocating for the termination of pregnancies which are going to put financial pressure on a parent, based on projected income, well, there's a name for that.  

And if you don't take it that far, if you merely encourage people who are on tight incomes to end pregnancies, then you are actually asking them to break to law, because, as we frequently discuss on this blog, an abortion for reasons other than the physical or mental health of the pregnant person is illegal in this country.  While personally I'll be working to change that law, it isn't likely that abortions on economic grounds will be allowable in the near future.

So if the "Can't Feed Don't Breed" brigade don't want to force poor people to have abortions, or even encourage them to break the law, then what's the next thing?  Use contraception?  Not 100% effective, so no guarantee of children resulting to impoverish their siblings and parents.  Oh wait I know, don't have consensual heterosexual sex!  At least not during the fertile years - so that's never for men and not until post-menopause for women.  This would certainly be good for that Homosexual Recruitment Drive we've all heard so much about.  

Let's not lose sight of the original point of discussion that the Herald article was about - the widening income disparity in Auckland.  How about we actually look at the real problem, rather than getting distracted.  The issue here is not too many children but too little money; low incomes, whether it be from paid employment or social welfare or a combination of both.

It's not that long ago that most people in this country could expect a reasonable standard of living for their family based on the income of one full time worker, even with three or more children in the household.  The area I represent at Auckland Council, Puketapapa, had the 18th lowest median income in the Herald's stats, despite having a lower percentage of people on benefits (10.5%) than many of the suburbs higher up.  I live here, in one of the poorer suburbs, and I work all over this part of town.  This gap is not about the choices of individuals, it is about a system that distributes wealth in a way that is all wrong.  We simply must lift incomes.  And we do that not by bagging people for having kids but by investing in education, in infrastructure, in social welfare, in job creation, in innovation, in pay equity and, in the public sector, in actual pay to public servants of all hues.  Focusing on procreation is a distraction, not a solution.

Quick bits & pieces

The pay equity discussion continues, with the Prime Minister saying there shouldn't be pay discrimination on the basis of pay and he's unaware of any evidence that there is, despite all the evidence that there is.

Hannah Tamaki has been disqualified from running for the leadership of the Maori Women's Welfare League.  More at Maui Street on this.

I did an interview for an article on feminism that was in the Herald on Sunday on the weekend but it isn't online yet.  They also talked to other online feministy types Alana and Coley.

Lots of discussion about the issue of bus drivers turning away women in burqa.  

There's a new (historic) rape complaint being laid against Dominique Strauss-Kahn.

Is it just me or did the EMA just reinforce their sexism?

Very quick post from me on the Issue of the Morning - Alasdair Thompson's incredibly sexist comments that women are paid less because of taking sick leave off for periods and childcare.

 This would be worrying on it's own, but the fact that Thompson leads the major employer body in New Zealand, the EMA, leaves me chilled.  These are the views he encounters when he talks to the employers he represents, and what echoes around the EMA and thus to other bodies it has a close relationship with like other employer bodies, the Business Round Table, and so on.

I wonder what it feels like today to be a woman employed by Thompson?  Or a woman in his family?

There are some great posts out there about this already by others, here's just a few of them, feel free to add more in comments.

unequal pay is ok with employers & manufacturers association - stargazer
This is what makes periods painful - stef
I'm sick of this bullshit. Period. -Tallulah Spankhead

I would like to add one thing to this discussion - which is to point to the EMA's media statement which went up on Scoop around ten minutes ago.  I believe this statement makes things worse, because it includes this kind of rubbish:

"Alasdair Thompson, chief executive of the Employers & Manufacturers Association, says its only right that women should be paid more than men when their output and productivity is greater than men.


We back higher pay for women when they're doing a better job than men, he said."

We are not talking about higher pay for women, we are talking about equal pay.  The problem is now that men are getting higher pay, as a group, and if you turn Thompson's statement above around then assumedly he means that men get higher pay than women because they're doing a better job than women.  Is it just me or did he just say something incredibly sexist?  Again.

ARGH!

Interesting read on mothering and working

Thanks to a FB friend for directing me towards this thought-provoking column at Salon, including:

When Paul Krugman warns that many of the currently jobless "will never work again," I am petrified -- hello, 3 a.m.! -- that he means me. I long ago lost track of how many jobs I have applied for, including some I wouldn't have looked twice at in my 20s, but I can count the resulting interviews and have fingers left to twiddle idly. Before I left full-time work in 1996, my then-husband and I, both reporters at the same newspaper, earned the exact same salary. Now my ex, still a reporter, is making $30,000 a year more than that, while I have been passed over for jobs paying $20,000 less.

Quite terrifying reading, although I think the author's situation may be a bit exacerbated by the industry she is in (journalism).  At least that's what I'm telling myself as I contemplate my return to the paid work that pays most of our bills in less than two months, when Snuffly will be a little over six months old. 

The article is of course quite US-centric, but I suspect many of the troubles Read is facing may translate here.  I haven't job-hunted for six years, so I'm totally out of touch with the realities of that quest - what are your experiences, whether you are seeking to mix paid work with child-rearing or not.

Gender pay gap still widening

Just a quick bit on this, no time for anything meatier from me tonight sorry. This is from a media statement from Sue Moroney (Labour) today:

“Labour's comprehensive plan to reduce the gap saw it close to 11.94% in March 2009, but since National closed down the Pay and Employment Equity Unit in June 2009, the pay gap has opened to 12.81% in just one year,” Sue Moroney said.

And here's a bit from the Greens' release:

“In June the Minister of Women’s Affairs tried to claim that the gender pay gap had narrowed since her Government took office. These numbers clearly show that the gap is as wide as ever,” Green Party Women’s Affairs Spokesperson Catherine Delahunty said.

The Quarterly Employment Survey, released today by Statistics New Zealand, includes measures of the average hourly wages of men and women. Comparing the two shows that women earn on average 12.81 percent less than men, up half a percent since March. 

October will be crunch time for the Minister, Pansy Wong, as that's when the NZ Income Survey comes out.  And that's the source she used back in March to try to show that the gender pay gap had lessened under National.  As I wrote at the time:

Fair enough. Even if the period she is crowing about was almost half under the previous Government, and not her National party, and even if by the end of the June 2009 quarter any new policies National had put in place on pay equity would not have had much effect. Oh but wait they didn't put any new policies on pay equity into effect, they just abolished efforts the last Government had made. Nevermind all that.

So Wong is safe, for now, with her statement, because she has compared apples with apples, even if it is not an apple her Government grew. It shall be interesting to see in October whether the NZ Income Survey ending June 2010 backs her up.

All the indicators to date are for a bigger gap in October.  While I don't really want a bigger gap, because what it means is that women are being paid even less than they were, in comparison to men, I would like to see this Minister held to account for her inaction.   And exposing her on the basis of statistics she used to mislead back in March sounds like an appropriate first step. 

why a man is not a financial plan

from monday's waikato times, this interview with the author of "why a man is not a financial plan", joan baker:

For those women banking on a marriage to see them through, financial adviser Joan Baker, author of Why a man is not a financial plan, and Smart Women delivers her killer question.

"Whatever your age or stage you should ask yourself: what would be mine or what would be my circumstance if he died, or left or whatever?"

However unsettling, she says, this mental exercise is critically important. The calculations, stripped of alimony fantasies and factoring in pay expectations and childcare costs, if relevant, can be revealing. By some estimates, a woman's standard of living drops an average of 73 per cent in the first year after divorce. The future doesn't get any brighter.

Of the elderly living in poverty, three out of four are said to be women and 80 per cent of them were not poor when they were partnered. Overall, nearly seven out of 10 women are projected to live in poverty some time in their lives.

Given the depressingly high divorce rate that forecasts a 50 per cent chance of marital success, there is reason to worry and even better reason to plan.

all of this basically ties into the point i was making in my last paragraph here. it's all very well to raise the issue, but the more important question is how to make that money and keep yourself financially secure. ms baker deals with unequal pay and discrimination in the workplace, issues which we have dealt with at length here. she also talks about self-employment and the difficulties with that. i also thought this bit was interesting:

"Obviously it isn't universally true but the bias is in that direction," says Baker. Those who would argue otherwise just need to look at the spending differences between men and women, she argues. "If you look generally at how women spend their wages or salary, a huge amount of that money goes into presenting well and looking good, whereas men's money will generally speaking be more likely go into what turns out to be good assets as opposed to handbags and shoes."

well yes, a little bit of a generalisation there, but the underlying point that women are under a lot of pressure to spend their money on their appearance is a valid one. it's a pressure that's constant and pretty hard to resist.

the piece (and possibly the book?) is aimed at professional women. but there are so many who are dealing with poverty and struggling at day-to-day living. they are just as much in need of financial planning and societal solutions around better pay and conditions. a pity that this wasn't covered as well.

Did Wong mislead Parliament?

On 18th February Catherine Delahunty asked the Minister of Women's Affairs some questions about the gender breakdown of appointments to a number of important committees established by National, specifically:

• The National Infrastructure Advisory Board (8 men, no women)
• The Tax Working Group (13 men, no women)
• Don Brash's 2025 Taskforce (5 men, 1 woman)
• The Independent Advisory Group on National Standards (4 men, 1 woman)

I blogged about the exhange around the pay gap at the time, and also about the Minister's response on the issue of women on boards, which included:

Hon PANSY WONG: The member will be pleased to know that the Government looks at the overall result, and in the quarter from October to December 2009, 47 percent of the board members appointed to Government boards and committees were women. I acknowledge my National Cabinet colleagues for recognising and appointing competent women to their boards.

Readers may recall I had been in discussion with the Ministry of Women's Affairs about accessing information to verify this, and do some further analysis*. Good on them, they came up with the goods, after a bit of a hiccup which they went to a great deal of trouble to make up for.

And what the data from the MWA shows is quite clear. Wong is correct with her 47% figure for appointments to Permanent State Sector Boards and Committees in the Oct-Dec 2009 Quarter (in fact it was 47.4%). To be counted in the Permanent category, for the stocktaking figure the Minister used to respond to Delahunty's query, a board or committee must be permanent, which is defined in the MWA information as "bodies established to work on a particular project that are expected to have completed their core business within a year."

But Delahunty didn't ask about Permanent State Sector Boards and Committees and she didn't ask about appointments made in the final quarter of 2009, which Wong relied on to respond to questioning in the House. In fact none of the appointments Delahunty asked about would have been included in the stat the Minister quoted to rebut implications her Government wasn't walking their talk on women's representation on their own boards.

The Tax Working Group was set up in May 2009 and has already completed its work (so not Permanent, and not counted in that quarter anyway). The Independent Advisory Group on National Standards started up in February 2010 and the Minister's statement indicated it will only be operating in the first year of the implementation of National Standards, i.e. for the rest of 2010 (also therefore not Permanent, and also not in that quarter).

Both the National Infrastructure Advisory Board and the 2025 Taskforce would fit in the Permanent category. But the former was established in May 2009, while the latter's spots were appointed in July 2009. So again, that single woman, and 13 men, would not have been in Wong's precious 47% figure.

I'm not an expert on what constitues appropriate responses to Parliamentary Questions, so I'll ask you, dear readers - did Wong mislead Parliament?


* More on this when I have a chance to properly write it up.

Guest post: Why should women have to wait for pay equality?

Many thanks to all round awesome person Rebecca Matthews for sharing with us her speech to the Graduate Gender Pay Gap discussion in Wellington last night. She spoke on behalf of the Pay and Employment Equity Challenge coalition. And thanks also to Jan Logie for her review of the meeting which prompted me to ask Becs for this contribution :-)

Thank you for the invitation to participate in this tonight’s discussion. It’s both good and bad to be here tonight. It’s good to be part of such an interesting panel with an interesting audience.
But it is a major disappointment that we are here, yet again, having to discuss, debate and identify the way forward to eliminate gender pay discrimination.

I don’t understand why, or accept, that women should have to wait in order to be paid fairly for our work. The time to act on this issue is long overdue. Why should women have to wait for pay equality when men don’t have to for their current pay advantage? They need to only need to wait 6 months after graduating to earn more than us.

I want to focus on two key issues tonight. The first is the need for urgent action now. The second is to examine the tactics that have been successful at closing the gender pay gap and how we can do more of what works to ensure that our daughters and granddaughters are not having the exact same conversation we’re having tonight.

I’m here representing the Pay and Employment Equity Challenge coalition. We are a coalition of unions, women’s groups and community groups who have got together to campaign to close the gender pay gap, for graduates and for all women workers.

We have a series of goals about educating the public and raising the profile of this issue, but our primary goal is the big one: achieve equal value and recognition of women’s work. We established the coalition in June last year following the closure of the Pay and Employment Equity Unit in the Department of labour.

Though I am a university graduate I’m also here today as a trade unionist. I want to work with others to do whatever will be most effective to getting to that goal of fair pay for women.

And in a way, while it is still important to educate the public and talk about the problem, I am getting pretty sick of hearing analysis of the causes of the gender pay gap – and probably not as sick of this as many women who have been campaigning on this issue a lot longer than I have!

I started to engage on pay equity issues as Women’s Rights Officer of the Auckland University Students’ Association in 1993.

And, seventeen years later it seems to me, very little has changed.

We have won some important work rights for women since then –paid parental leave, the right to request flexible working hours, and breaks and facilities for breastfeeding.

But the gender pay gap is still significant, and there still seems to be little enthusiasm at the moment from government or employers to be doing anything about it.

The closure of the Pay and Employment Equity Unit in The Department of Labour, which was starting to show some good results in achieving fairer workplace practices in the public sector, is a very overt signal of the lack of intention and enthusiasm to close the gender pay gap.
I am dismayed by the ongoing focus on research of the problem.

The latest MWA numbers are important, but they should be a spur for action, not for further reflection.

It seems to me that there are too many people, and particularly in this government, who use further research and analysis as a shield to hide behind, because they actually don’t view the gender pay gap as a problem and don’t want to commit to doing anything about it..
So who and how are we going to deliver on that goal of fair recognition for women’s work?

So far, it is really only through womens groups and unions organising and campaigning that change has come about.

There are virtually no examples of employers voluntarily and willingly improving pay and employment equity.

And where there are examples they tend to be in individual workplaces, so the changes have little effect on an industry or the workforce as a whole and when women leave those workplaces they will be subject to the inequality of the rest of the job market again.

And there are also scant examples of politicians making long-lasting meaningful change to the law that allows for pay and employment discrimination against women.

So far in New Zealand most of the work around making pay fairer for women has been because women’s groups, and trade unions, particularly women in unions have fought long and hard for it. This is a hard process.

For unionists, it requires high levels of union density, commitment of resources our unions often lack, and years of single-minded campaigning to achieve our goals.

We have had our successes and they have been spectacular. In particular, I think of the pay settlement the New Zealand Nurses Organisation achieved as a result of their stunning campaign under the leadership of Laila Harre.

In the private sector the situation is grim. In the private sector, we lack even the most basic information to know whether we are even accessing our current legal right to Equal Pay.
Without equivalent legislation to the State Sector Act we don’t even have access to basic tools like the ability to OIA information about gender pay gaps. We rely on the cooperation of uncooperative employers. It is a legal framework that acts against women and dooms our campaign to failure.

The union I work for, Finsec, the finance sector union - is dealing with some of the biggest and richest employers in the country but we have probably the largest gender pay gap.
In Australia, finance and insurance is the most unequal industry with a gender pay gap of 31.9%.
The limited numbers we have seen from New Zealand banks show men at a pre-management level being paid on average way above the pay scales.

I believe the banking industry may have an equal pay as well as a pay equity problem, founded on those two old chestnuts of lower starting salaries and lack of promotion paths for women staff.
However we are currently reliant on the banks providing us on a voluntary basis with accurate information about gender pay. One suggestion I bring tonight is that all private sector employers should be required to make public information about gender pay in their workforce, much the same as can occur in the public sector.

It is not right to pay women less than men for work of equal value and it should not be legal to do so either.

We need urgent legislative and political change to close the gender pay gap.

So what are some of the solutions I am saying we so urgently need to focus on?

A legislative framework is required to achieve pay equity Employers should be required to report their gender pay statistics and there should be sanctions if they are found to discriminate on the basis of gender.

The Equal Pay act is meaningless if its not enforceable and outcomes are not transparent. It should not be up to individual workers or unions to face the battle and costs of taking it up legally.

There should be accessible tools to support employers and workers to achieve pay and employment equity.

With only 21% of the workforce unionised in this country, we need to increase our levels of collective bargaining and unionisation .

High levels of inequality are correlated with low levels of collective bargaining and unionisation.
The minimum wage should be immediately increased to $15 an hour to lift the many thousands of women at the bottom of the pay tail.

And the ability for unions to bargain at an industry level must be increased. Strong unions, full of women, will be a critical counter to the current employer and political commitment to retaining the discriminatory status quo.

As American suffragette Susan B. Anthony once said “Join the union, girls, and together say Equal Pay for Equal Work”.

Will the Ministry of Women's Affairs meet the deadline?

Readers may recall that I made an OIA request of the Ministry of Women's Affairs almost a month ago. I've asked for information about Government appointments to boards, as a result of the Minister's claims in Parliament on Equal Pay Day that in the October - December 2009 quarter 47% of those appointed were women.

I've not even had a form response from the MWA saying they'll get back to me, and their 20 days to fill the request, under the Official Information Act, expire on March 18th...

Ideas looks at the "A Bit Rich" report

Today's Ideas programme, presented by Chris Laidlaw this morning, I only caught a snippet of this, but it sounded great.

(A reminder, this is the report done by the New Economics thinktank based in the UK which looked at the true value of some key areas of work and discovered that bankers destroy lots of wealth and nursery workers create lots of wealth)

Kiwiblog readers solve gender pay gap. Hurrah!

Although he thinks there is no problem, David Farrar of Kiwiblog has written about the gender pay gap research released by Pansy Wong yesterday and widely reported today.

While Farrar says it is "disappointing" that there is evidence female graduates are paid less than male graduates only a year after completing their degrees, he doesn't think it is due to discrimination. Assumedly it is just those mischevious magical elves again, just mysteriously playing with people's pay so that women are on average mysteriously paid less than men. Nothing to see here, move right along.

Anyway, despite his scepticism about gender being relevant to this problem, Farrar does endorse the next research project the Ministry of Women's Affairs is going to undertake in this area; a large longitudinal study over the next ten years. I agree that this seems like a pretty good idea. Shame this Government scrapped the Pay and Employment Equity Unit that wasn't just measuring the problem but was actually looking at the reasons and possible solutions.

Farrar doesn't posit any ways to resolve the gender pay gap, putting it down to women taking time out of the workforce to have children, and/or "different professions having different gender compositions". Such shallow analysis that doesn't ask why it is predominantly women who take that time out, when most children have two parents at least at the start of their lives, or why different professions have different gender compositions (and what effect that has).

But that's ok, because the Kiwiblog commenters, who some label the sewer, come to the riding to the rescue. They know precisely what to do. Here's a few ideas:

• Women are not agressive enough in their pay negotiations/accept lower pay/are less motivated by money/are less ambitious
  
• "men, as a group, simply prove themselves better in the fields of management and commerce than women and earn their larger salaries"
• Women dare to take leave to have/care for children, whereas men are much less likely to do so. And even if they haven't taken leave yet they might in the future, so why would you pay them as much as a man? Maybe we should get rid of maternity leave, that would solve that problem.
  
• Women don't want to have careers and men do
• The only way to address the issue is to pay women more than men, which would mean men are more likely to be hired over women (yeah I didn't understand that one either)
• Men are more loyal employees than women (because they don't take maternity leave)
• Men change jobs more often with the aim of getting higher salaries
• It's the jobs women are choosing, they just pay less (magically. For no reason)
  
• Male graduates are more likely to have had previous management jobs before studying (no evidence provided for this)
• Men are more likely to be in senior positions, therefore a few highly paid men drag the average up
• Pansy Wong should have been fired "years ago" (she's been in the job since Nov 2008)
• Women have lower self-esteem and higher voices than men
  
• Women need to work like men - "no chatty phone calls, no gossip with the girls, no slacking off, no shopping breaks, work an extra hour at the end of each day, don’t get coffee and NEVER clean up after an office shout, even if someone drops cake on the floor at your feet and expects you to pick it up. ...Finally, if you are working part time with children, you have to work extra hours at home, and be available for urgent work."

So basically women need to be men to get paid the same as men for doing the same work. Right. That solves that then.

Danyl, oh thank goodness for Danyl, adds a jolt of sanity, suggesting that we could look at having "a government body that audits large employers and looks for gender discrimination and publicises results (ie this company has a 15% gender pay gap between comparable jobs)."

According to the Kiwiblog commenters, there is sexism in the way men and women are treated at work, but guess what, it's not quite what you or I might expect. Apparently:

• Unskilled men are paid less than unskilled women, so actually this gender pay gap stuff it's all just BS (no evidence provided for this out there claim)
• Men can't get hired in clerical jobs because women keep them out
• Making Pansy Wong Minister of Women's Affairs in the first place discriminated against non-Asian males

And I'll leave the last word to the appropriately named TripeWryter:

Discrimination in the workplace?: try being a middle-aged, educated, white male …

The Graduate Gender Pay Gap

Organised by the NZ Federation of Graduate Women

When: 6pm - 7.30pm, Tuesday 16th March

What: Panel Discussion - on The Graduate Gender Pay Gap

Where: Lecture theatre 1, Rutherford House, Victoria University Pipitea Campus, Bunny St, Wellington

Chaired by Professor Margaret Clark, panel includes Sarah Turner (Ministry of Women's Affairs), Peter Cullen (employment lawyer), Rebecca Matthews (Pay & Employment Equity Coalition), Phillipa Reed (EEO Trust).

This is an open meeting for all who are interested in this issue. Light refreshments served from 5.30pm.

The gender pay gap and the Minister of Women's Affairs

Today in Parliament the Minister of Women's Affairs, National's Pansy Wong, claimed that the pay gap was now 11.3%, in response to questioning from Green MP Catherine Delahunty:

Hon PANSY WONG: ...For 9 long years under the previous Labour Government, the 12 percent pay gap increased to 12.8 percent for the year ended June 2008. For the year ended June 2009, the pay gap had gone down to 11.3 percent. The National Government is working for women.

...Catherine Delahunty: It has gone up to 13 percent. I seek leave to table the Red Bag Day bag, with no money in it for women; my male colleagues are welcome to donate.

...Charles Chauvel: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. I wonder whether the Minister, when she referred to the statistics showing that the pay gap had decreased, was quoting from an official document—

Mr SPEAKER: Order! Oh, I beg the member’s pardon.

Charles Chauvel: —and if so, whether she might table that document under the Standing Orders.

Mr SPEAKER: I beg the member’s pardon. Could the Hon Pansy Wong please clarify whether she was quoting from an official document.

Hon PANSY WONG: I was thinking I would seek your leave to table those statistics, Mr Speaker, but I did not think that you would allow it, because they came from the annual New Zealand Income Survey, prepared by Statistics New Zealand...

Labour's Sue Moroney pursued this matter further when she asked her own questions about gender equity issues later in the session, attempting to table several documents that record the gender pay gap as bigger than Wong claimed in her answer, but they were all objected to. These included "a statistical bulletin [from the Parliamentary Library], salary and wage rates, showing that in 2008 the male-female wage gap was 13.8 percent, and in 2009, it was 14.8 percent."

The NZ Income Survey* that Wong refers to can be found on the Statistics NZ website. Here's a key quote from the survey report:

Comparing female earnings with male earnings, the ratio of median hourly earnings in the June 2009 quarter was 88.7 percent, an increase from the June 2008 quarter ratio of 87.2 percent.

And that seems to be where Wong has got her 11.3% from. Fair enough. Even if the period she is crowing about was almost half under the previous Government, and not her National party, and even if by the end of the June 2009 quarter any new policies National had put in place on pay equity would not have had much effect. Oh but wait they didn't put any new policies on pay equity into effect, they just abolished efforts the last Government had made. Nevermind all that.

So Wong is safe, for now, with her statement, because she has compared apples with apples, even if it is not an apple her Government grew. It shall be interesting to see in October whether the NZ Income Survey ending June 2010 backs her up.

But in the meantime, Frog does have some more recent figures than June 2009, as follows:

Let’s look at the December 2009 figures from the Household Labour Force Survey and compare them with December 2008 – that covers the first full year of the National-led government, which is a far more relevant period:

Source: Statistics NZ Household Labour Force Survey

The gender pay gap has actually increased from 12.45% to 12.97% - some very bad news for the Minister, I would suggest.

We could quibble about which measurement to take for weeks on end. And no doubt Wong would like that, because it lets her off the hook for being the Minister of Women's Affairs who abolished the Pay Equity Investigation Unit, who has not implemented or indeed proposed any policy around addressing the gender pay gap, and who revells in not taking the issue seriously. Shame on her, by whichever measure you choose to use.




* Of course it's not only who women who suffer a pay gap. While the median hourly earnings for Europeans was $20.00, for Pacific Islanders it was $16.50, and for Maori it was $17.50, in the same survey.

Equal Pay Day round-up

Coverage etc that I've found so far for today, Equal Pay Day (aka Red Bag Day):

• Anne's post earlier this week on Red Bag Day activities in Wellington
• Women in Red, release from the Pay Equity Coalition
• Red Bay Day, blog post from the Pay Equity Coalition
  
• 28 years of false promises has women seeing red, release from the Federation of Business and Professional Women (BPW)
• Equal Pay Day: Time to take the government to the UN, blog post by Idiot/Savant
• Red Bay Day Highlights Shameful Pay Inequality - NZ Labour Party
  

I also note that there were two Oral Parliamentary Questions asked today on issues related to the gender pay gap, so will be put up a link to the debates around those when they are available (and I have time). UPDATE: Here are links to the exchanges around Catherine Delahunty and Sue Moroney's questions.

Please let me know via comments if you spot anything else and I'll add it when I can :-)

Pay Equity rally in Hamilton last Friday

Big thanks to The Worker's Hero (aka Super G) for sending this pic through. They are outside the local National Party office in Hamilton.