Ample salary means few women apply
Few women are applying for some of the highestpaying jobs in New Zealand, according to figures from Trade Me jobs.
Applications from more than 72,000 job listings on Trade Me from April to
June showed just 16 per cent of applicants for engineering jobs were from women. That percentage was 20 per cent for IT jobs.
Head of Trade Me Jobs Jeremy Wade said little had changed in the last three years.
‘‘Some commentators have suggested this issue is dead and buried and we don’t need to think too much about diversity in the workplace. But until these numbers change, we disagree,’’ he said.
The number of women applying for IT jobs had remained the same since 2015, and had fallen in the engineering sector from 22 per cent.
Education, administration and office jobs were dominated by women, with more than 70 per cent of applications coming from women.
Government and council jobs were the only ones on an even keel at 50 per cent.
The number of women applying for the highest-paying jobs had also remained the same, with 33 per cent of applications for jobs offering a salary of at least $100,000 from women, up 1 per cent from 2015.
‘‘Female applicants are over-represented in applications for lower-paying roles and heavily underrepresented for roles above $60,000,’’ Wade said.
‘‘Women apply for 54 per cent of roles under $40,000, and 46 per cent of roles between $40,000 and $60,000, but are down around 30 per cent for for all of the higher brackets.’’
He said there was a disparity between the number of job searches by women versus the number of roles they applied for.
‘‘Our analysis has indicated women tend to view more listings when they are searching for a new job, but apply less,’’ Wade said.
‘‘Women do 56 per cent of all searches but only submit 48 per cent of applications.
‘‘Perhaps women think they need to meet more of the job requirements than men do before they apply. Or maybe the job ads themselves contain unconscious language bias that is putting women off applying.
‘‘It’s likely that both are factors among a plethora of issues that contribute to the gender imbalance across the majority of industries and workplaces in New Zealand.
‘‘But when it comes to attracting women to apply for jobs, there are a lot of tools out there that can help employers remove any unconscious bias from their job ads. We need to think more about how these things can impact on diverse hiring.’’