Women disown old expectations
Fewer opt to be mums but critics remain, writes Isaac Davison
Last month, a large New Zealand bank started encouraging its staff to “leave loudly”. Westpac New Zealand wanted its employees to stop slipping out of the office sheepishly on the dot of 5pm to pick up their kids from school, and said they should instead leave confidently and clearly regardless of the time of day.
The policy, adopted from the United States, is a small symptom of a gradual social shift in New Zealand towards greater flexibility in the workplace.
“When I left work before 5 o’clock to get my daughter from creche I used to tell people I had a commitment,” said Tracey Bridges, co-founder of the Good Registry and a member of Global Women, which promotes gender equality in business.
“Which was true, but I was framing it in a way that could have equally been a client appointment that I had to go to.
“These days what I am loving is that, we can talk about it, it is okay to need to leave the office at 5 o’clock to get your kids.
“Young women in particular but also young men are starting to say ‘Yeah, nah’ — I want to work hard, want to be good at my job, but maybe don’t want to sacrifice so much of my own flexibility and ability to choose how I use my time.”
Greater workplace flexibility is one measure of the social progress being made for women in New Zealand in 2018.
The greatest social gains were made in the 1960s and 70s with the arrival of the contraceptive pill and more accessible abortions — though abortion rights have returned to the spotlight in the past year because of reformers’ push to get it declassified as a crime.
New Zealand women have gradually shifted away from the traditional expectations of family life and work.
More women are choosing not to have children, and those who do are having them later as they prioritise their careers. Most children are now born when the mother is between 30 and 34. In 2013, 16 per cent of women aged 40-44 were childless — up from 9 per cent in 1981.
But while those choices are increasingly being made, it does not mean they are being readily accepted by society.
“Whatever choices women make, whether it is to have a family or not have a family, that has always been absolutely scrutinised and criticised,” said Bridges.
“And I don’t really see a massive amount of change there.”
Another key measure of social progress is how women are portrayed in public life.
Catherine Harris, managing director of the ad agency TBWA Group, said advertising in this country still reverted to traditional gender roles.
“So if it’s a big, powerful car ad, for example, it will usually be for men, and women will be talking about food and shopping . . . or will be shown in the home. “We’ve got a long way to go about how we better represent women — and represent humanity — day to day.”
The overtly sexist representation of women as sex objects and domestic servants has mostly gone, but what has replaced it can be more difficult to combat. “When it’s more nuanced you know in your gut that it is wrong, but it is harder to articulate and explain and harder to reject, to separate yourself from it.” This year has also been marked by heightened concern about sexual harassment in the workplace, a local response to the #MeToo movement in Hollywood. “I think we’re at quite a big turning point,” said Harris. “It’s a more sophisticated conversation than we’ve been having in the past about genuine representation and different types of stories being told.”
In the arts world, an institutional bias against women has only started being broken down in the last 15 years.
Heather Harris, acting head of curatorial and exhibitions at Auckland Art Gallery, said just 15 per cent of the gallery’s vast collection were by women. The gallery is now seeking out women artists’ work, and has collected 680 pieces in the past seven years — compared to 200 in all of the 1990s.
And in the sporting world, men dominate coverage and funding, though there have been incremental changes this year — in particular the professionalisation of the Black Ferns and pay parity for men’s and women’s national football sides.
One of the striking phrases that comes through repeatedly this week in our series The Equality Test is “I’m not in favour of quotas, but . . . ” To mark the 125th anniversary of women’s suffrage, the Herald has examined whether women in New Zealand have achieved equality with men.
A recurring theme has been senior women in business observing that while change is happening, the speed is glacial. As NZ Global Women chief executive Miranda Burdon put it: “New Zealand is well placed to take the lead without explicit rules like quotas, but only if we act.”
One of the most alarming findings was the contradiction between female success in education and low pay in the workplace. Young women are now outperforming men at school and university, making up 62 per cent of tertiary graduates. Those with a bachelor degree are even paid fractionally more on average in their first year of work but after five years have fallen about $4000 behind. Women with doctorates lag their male colleagues by more than $11,000.
That trend continues throughout most women’s careers. The gender pay gap is minuscule for 20 to 24-year-olds and 4.2 per cent for those aged 25 to 29. But from the age of 30 it begins to grow, reaching a peak of 18.4 per cent for women aged 50 to 54.
A small part can be explained by the so-called “motherhood gap” — the amount that women lose long term by taking time out from work to have children.
Unsurprisingly this gap increases the longer a woman stays out of the workforce. It is difficult to resolve because in some cases women choose to sacrifice pay gains for what they and their partners regard as a more important family role. That may change as more men give up work to be fulltime fathers but overall the parenting debate is a red herring in the wider context of pay inequity.
Research for the Ministry of Women has calculated that 80 per cent of the pay gap is unexplained by time out for parenting or other factors, such as women choosing lower paid jobs than men. That leaves two main possibilities which are equally difficult to determine — either many women do not push hard enough for pay rises, as Retirement Commissioner Dianne Maxwell suggested this week, or many employers are either consciously or unconsciously biased against them.
Common sense suggests the two factors are working together.
Most people do not consider themselves sexist or racist, but when faced with a big decision — such as who to choose for a promotion — they tend to play safe and pick people most like themselves. That is probably why we have only two female chief executives leading our top 50 companies. It also explains why many women are so reluctant to put themselves forward, as they anticipate rejection, often correctly.
The fact that Mā ori and Pacific women are also paid considerably less than Pākehā women suggests a rethink is long overdue.
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