More attention is being given to the gender pay gap in New Zealand since the change of Government.

Stuff: Broadcasters silent on pay equity, as Stats NZ plan to measure gender gap

The Government has ordered Statistics NZ to begin measuring the country’s gender pay gap.

Levelling out salaries in the public sector is something the new Government has committed to.

Recently media companies across the world have female co-hosts quitting due to the gender pay gap – citing that doing the same job and not getting the same pay was not right.

Quitting doesn’t fix the problem.

On November 14 last year TVNZ’s Hilary Barry tweeted “Dear Women of NZ, I’ve got some bad news for you. From today until the end of the year you’re working for free.”

Barry is rumoured to be fronting Seven Sharp, which has always had a formula of one male and one female presenter. TVNZ would not comment if there would be any discrepancy in wages for the incoming hosts.

MediaWorks also refused to say whether The Project hosts Jesse Mulligan, Kanoa Lloyd and Josh Thomson, were paid equally. The show returns to screens on Monday.

The article did not say whether Fairfax was asked whether there is a gender pay gap in their media operations.

Mark Greer, owns Hawke’s Bay business services company Bizdom​.

Greer questioned if the Government would even be able to tackle the topic, because it was one that was a lot more convoluted than a simple tweak to legislation.

“I would be concerned if the Government started saying I had to have certain percentage of females and males. I just don’t know if the Government can do anything about [decreasing the gender wage gap].”

The Government can ensure that there is pay equity in the public service. They can also encourage and pressure private companies in to doing likewise – having good statistics will help with this.

The Labour-Green confidence and supply agreement includes:

12. . Eliminate the gender pay gap within the core public sector with substantial progress within this Parliamentary term, and work to ensure the wider public sector and private sector is on a similar pathway.

“Substantial progress within this Parliamentary term” and “ensure the wider public sector and private sector is on a similar pathway” is vague and indicates no confidence in rapid change.

Stuff:

But new Statistics Minister James Shaw believed there was an onus on his department to gather the data, so the Government could fix it.

It was too early to know exactly how it was going to be measured, Shaw said in a written statement.

That statement from Shaw appears to have been to the Sunday Star Times, I can’t find it anywhere online.

Utopia – you are standing in it! has posted:

Not sure to what to make of this because extensive data is already collected.

From this link:

Summary and recommendation

We consider that median hourly earnings from the New Zealand Income Survey (NZIS) is the best measure for calculating the gender pay gap.

We recommend this measure for three reasons.

• Hourly earnings measure pay for a fixed quantity of work.
• The median is a better measure of ‘typical’ pay than the average (mean).
• NZIS collects individuals’ income from paid jobs, which allows us to build a picture of how pay is distributed across the population.

Using the NZIS measure, we find that in the June 2015 quarter the gender pay gap was 11.8 percent. This means that a typical male earned about 12 percent more for an hour’s work than a typical female.

The gender pay gap has generally been decreasing since 1998, and has fluctuated in the last few years.

What does the gender pay gap look like in New Zealand?

In the June 2015 quarter, median hourly pay for males was $24.07 and for females it was $21.23. The gender pay gap was 11.8 percent. This means that a typical female earned about 12 percent less for an hour’s work than a typical male.

It was trending down at the end of last century but didn’t change much during the Clark government years.

Was it the Global Financial Crisis that closed the pay gap slightly from 2008? That looks likely because it is trending up again.

Does this reflect an entrenched pay disparity, or is it because females are still far more likely to interrupt their careers to raise families? Or females don’t put such a priority on high earning jobs? It’s probably a complex mix of all of this.

Sometimes it can be pure business economics. All Blacks earn substantially more than their female counterparts the Black Ferns, so male players will be able to be paid substantially more.

In other fields it can be more complicated. Do male TV presenters attract better ratings and more advertising revenue than female presenters? Is this because they are given better opportunities, better shows, better time slots? It will be difficult to determine these things simply through statistics.

Aged care workers have recently had large pay increases to address a court ruling that there was real disparity. This should also apply to mental health workers and others, but comparing different types of jobs can be difficult, and there’s a risk if creating a snowball effect – if one industry succeeds in proving greater worth then others will want to catch up or keep ahead. It can be complicated and continually evolving.

Better statistics help understand the situation and trends (or lack of trends), but I think it is also important to look at more than this to get a real picture of the size and scope of the problem.

See also Alison Mau: It’s time to come clean on how big the pay gap really is

The Government’s push to collect data on the gender pay gap might just be the first meaningful step to solve an intractable problem.

Like the five stages of grief, the worldwide discussion on the issue looks to be moving past denial and into anger; although academics and the more savvy business leaders have known for some time that the gap is there and should be nixed (because that makes good business sense) it has taken a series of resignations by high profile media women to bring it sharply into focus for everyone. This is unfortunate and unfair – why should it be the injustices done in ivory towers that get all the ink – but true.

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Starting with big businesses makes sense as they’re the ones who employ the bulk of New Zealanders, and can carry out the work without too much cost or disruption. Maybe now’s the time, then. Coupled with whatever Statistics New Zealand comes up with after Minister James Shaw’s directive, we could start seeing a real difference.

Information is power, and right now, what we don’t know is most certainly hurting us.

Better statistics will help, but a comprehensive understanding will need more than that.