Fighting the gender pay gap
Jan Logie is furious. Just as a new report revealed the gender pay gap is still very much alive and well in New Zealand, her member’s bill, aimed at fixing the problem, was given the thumbs-down in parliament.
The Green MP’s Equal Pay Amendment Bill would have required employers to record how much men and women are paid for doing the same job. The information would then have been passed on to the Department of Labour for publication in aggregate form. It lost by one vote.
A report commissioned by the Ministry for Women and released a few days before shows the gap between what men and women are paid on average has barely shifted since the last attempt to measure the difference was published in 2003.
Empirical Evidence of the Gender Pay Gap in New Zealand points out that the gender pay gap currently sits at around 12.7%, compared with 12.8% in 2008, with the divide more pronounced for women on higher pay.
“Employers already have to collect payroll data,” says
Jan. “The generous hope with my bill was that when employers were putting that information together to send off to the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment, they might look at it and think, ‘I wonder why the men in our organisation are being paid so much more,’ and make some improvements.
“Basically, the government has said it is okay with secrecy and by virtue of that it is okay with women continuing to find out by accident that they’re being paid less than the guy next to them.”
Moves to update 1972’s Equal Pay Act, which the government was touting as a solution to pay equity issues, were retrograde rather than forwardthinking and created even more hurdles for women, she said.
“It turns taking a pay equity case into a very complicated process. It is, pointedly I think, making it harder and actually overturning the decision made by courts that the comparison could be with a job with similar skills and responsibilities [the Bartlett settlement].
“We’ve had nine years of consciously continuing to underpay thousands and thousands of women, and now they’re trying to make it harder.
“Women should be pissed off about it. I mean the suffragettes were working on this for God’s sake! That’s 145 years ago and now they’re just rewinding the clock.”