How’s Labour done with gender pay gap?
The Ardern Government has a mixed record on reducing the gender pay gap, reports Brittney Deguara.
Before she was elected prime minister, Jacinda Ardern vowed to close the gender pay gap and redraft pay equity legislation.
She promised her party wouldn’t rest until pay equitywas achieved. Three years later, it still has work to do.
For two decades, governments have attacked the problem primarily by focusing on the public sector.
The Labour government led by Helen Clarkwas the first to get serious about trying to close the gap.
In 2003, a Taskforce on Pay and Employment Equity was created.
A report from the group set out ways to address issues affecting women’s pay and employment. It said there should be an equal proportion of women and men across all positions in the public sector. That didn’t happen until this year for both senior leadership positions and state service boards.
Between 2000 and 2008, under the Clark
Government, themedian gender pay gap in the public sector fell 3.8 percentage points to 12.9 per cent.
In the following nine years, under National, the gap continued to edge down by 3.2 percentage points to 9.7 per cent.
During Ardern’s three-year term, it has fallen 3.9 points to 5.8 per cent.
A couple of initiativesmay have helped to accelerate the narrowing of the gap within the public sector.
The Gender Pay Taskforce was created in August 2018 to implement the Government’s Gender Pay Gap Action Plan. The plan requires all public service chief executives to take responsibility for closing gender pay gaps in their agencies.
As of June last year, Oranga Tamariki had become the first to eliminate the gap. The Department of Conservation and Department of Corrections were the next closest to zero.
The task force’s plan also requires flexible-by-default arrangements in theworkplace and a gender balance in leadership teams.
Across the labourmarket as a whole, however, there has been less progress. The data used to examine the gap in thewider economy is calculated in a different way and by a different agency from that for the public sector.
But it’s clear that the gender pay gap as a whole has been more persistent outside of the public sector. Since 2000, there has been an overall downward trend but it has not been continuous between years.
Between 2017 and 2020, it has actually edged up from 9.4 to 9.5 per cent. That was after it had fallen from 12 per cent in 2016.
On November 7, the Equal Pay Amendment Bill will take effect. It may help.
The law allows employees in workforces dominated by women to make pay equity claims more easily, possibly without the need for court action.