Māori and Pasifika women working for ‘free’ for the rest of the year from today

Dita De Boni - October 21, 2024. Originally published in The Post.

New pay gap registry aims to try and close persistent differences between median men and women’s pay.123RF

Māori and Pasifika women start this week effectively working for ‘free’ until the end of the year compared to what Pakeha men earn - a consistent pay gap of around 20% that has barely budged in decades.

This weekend marked 52 years since New Zealand’s Equal Pay Act was signed into law, and on the current trajectory, it will take until 2055 until the pay gap - the difference between the median hourly earnings of women and men - is closed.

Currently the gap between Pakeha men and Pakeha women’s pay is 8.6%, roughly the same as it has been since 2018, but between Pakeha men and Asian women it is 18.2%,between Pakeha men and Māori women is 19% and between Pakeha men and Pasifika women is 20.9%

Those working to close the pay gap have had to redouble their efforts after the new coalition government disestablished the Pay Equity Taskforce in May, and said it would not progress legislation that would have provided for mandatory pay gap reporting introduced by the outgoing Labour government prior to the election last year.

Pay gap reporting, when companies have to stump up with their data around median pay for men and women in their organisations, has been shown overseas to lead to them working harder to close those gaps, and that’s why it is mandatory in countries such as Australia, France, the UK and Sweden for companies over a certain size.

Dellwyn Stuart, co-founder of Mind the Gap, is running the new Pay Gap Insights Hub.

The coalition government does not favour a mandatory approach, but does intend to introduce a voluntary calculation tool that will allow businesses to calculate their pay gaps themselves.

“All action is fantastic in this space, so a tool that is free, that organisations can tap into and feel confident they'll be producing numbers that are comparable to other people's numbers - that’s a positive step,” said Dellwyn Stuart, the co-founder of the Mind the Gap public registry, where businesses are encouraged to voluntarily register their gender and ethnicity pay gaps publicly.

“Is it everything we need? No. But it is a positive step.”

Launched in 2022, the Mind the Gap registry started with 50 of New Zealand’s largest companies including Westpac, SkyCity, and Mercury Energy, and has since grown to include 116. That is a small number compared to the 3000 that qualify as large enough to be best placed to disclose their pay gaps, but Stuart said despite not actively campaigning to get companies onto the registry at the moment, “they're still coming in”.

But she admits there’s a big opportunity to get more businesses on the registry, and she’s got a data weapon to brandish: almost 80% of companies that had reported their gaps over consecutive years had managed to close at least some of their gap, according to the first-ever close analysis of the reported pay gap data.

The analysis was released as part of the launch of a new Pay Gap Insights Hub this week, which offers resources for companies looking to close their gaps.

Claire Walker, chief people officer for Genesis Energy, which was an early adopter of pay gap reporting (as was Air New Zealand under the leadership of now PM Christopher Luxon) said having a place like the Insights Hub would be useful for companies to share expertise and knowledge “and build capability around reporting …so when you are comparing your pay gap to others, the same sort of methodology and approach is being used by everyone.”

Claire Walker, Genesis Energy chief people officer says the company has not closed its gap as much as it would have liked.

Despite being part of the pay gap reporting initiative from the early days, Genesis had not managed to close its gap as much as it would have liked: “it really comes down to the participation of women in Stem [ science, technology, engineering and mathematics]-related careers, so whilst we're a retail business, as well as a wholesale business, we do find women in those Stem and more qualified roles [are fewer], and that’s a problem we are working to solve,” Walker said.

Another problem the company was working to solve was the Māori and Pasifika pay gap, which more and more companies were also publishing alongside their gender pay gaps. At present, Genesis doesn’t report its ethnic pay gap, but intended to in 1-2 years’ time when it had more data on peoples’ ethnicity, which is not always straightforward.

Declaring ethnicity data was voluntary, so for a start, “you've got to build the trust and confidence of your employee base that you're going to do something meaningful with that information,” she said.

“That's why Genesis and other organisations are putting in place things like inclusion councils or targeted programs …if you're going to collect ethnicity data, you want to see that it's going to be used in a way that is actually supporting your career growth, and is going to be protected from a privacy perspective.

“We ask all our new prospective employees about gender but also ethnicity, so that we capture that right from the outset. But it does take time to build up a reliable percentage of employees who have provided that information.”

Stuart said she was pleased to see more and more companies that had “nailed” their gender pay gap reporting were moving to try and quantify ethnic pay gaps.

“We've got 26% now reporting the Māori pay gap now,” she said. “It’s not hard, but you need to understand your people and build the data - and then the calculation’s the same.

“I’m so pleased to see growth in ethnic pay gap reporting, and I hope to see more.”