Let’s make suffragettes proud of us
Women have had the vote for a century but that doesn’t make us equal.
There are some things in life that make absolutely no sense to me: meditation courses where you can’t speak for days on end, Vegemite, people who remove cheese from their lives just because they can, and the gender pay gap.
This week is Suffrage Week. It’s officially been 123 years since New Zealand women fought and won the right to vote.
But I can’t help wondering, if you’d told those same women that we would still be fighting for women to receive equal pay more than 100 years later, whether they would have ever put their placards down.
That’s not to say there haven’t been attempts to fix the problem.
It was all the way back in 1972 when Parliament implemented the Equal Pay Act. It was a law that basically set out that it was no longer legal to have gender-based pay scales (granted, the public service got rid of them in the 1960s, but it took another 10 years for universal coverage.) The premise was pretty simple. If a job required the same level of skills, effort and responsibilities, and the conditions of work were the same, but the rates and scales were different between male and female employees, then that would be a breach of the law. But how do you test this principle for areas of work that are primarily performed by women?
It is a good question and one it seems we have spent the past four decades debating. In fact, there was, for a time, a specific government unit (the Pay and Employment Equity Unit) established for the sole purpose of addressing this persistent problem. It was disbanded by the current Government in 2009, when the gender pay gap was 22.9 per cent.
If the Government wasn’t going to resolve the issue, then the courts could. Three years ago, a rest home worker called Kristine Bartlett took a case under the Equal Pay Act that ended up going all the way to the Supreme Court. The court agreed that equal pay meant equal pay for equal value, and found that her then hourly rate of $14.32 was a result of gender discrimination.
Following the Bartlett case, the big question was now what? There were two options – we see a huge number of individual cases go through the courts, or we could find another way. The other way became known as the Joint Working Group on Pay Equity. Huge credit should go those who formed this group of government, business and union leaders, especially the unions, who agreed to put thousands of cases on hold to instead wait for the results. And the results are in.
In May, the working group produced a report that essentially set out how employees could take equal pay claims directly to their employers, with the Employment Relations Authority as a back-stop measure. It was a pragmatic, solutionsfocused report, and one that has been agreed upon by all those we needed to form a consensus. So why are we still waiting? Why hasn’t Cabinet signed off on the report?
It’s 2016. I doubt anyone would argue in this day in age that women should be earning less than men in any roles with the same level of skills, effort and responsibilities. And nor can anyone now argue that, what is fundamentally a human rights issue, is just too hard to resolve. We have a solution in front of us, and a chance to once again carve out our place as leaders on equality issues – we should take it.
We have a solution in front of us.