A world-first gender pay gap register is hoped to help fill the fiscal hole left by salary disparities
About 50 New Zealand companies are baring all in a voluntary pay gap index unveiled on Tuesday - and more are being called on to follow suit.
The voluntary register established by MindTheGap shows whether each company is reporting their pay gaps for women, Māori, and Pasifika, along with a link to their reporting results.
Dellwyn Stuart, co-leader of MindTheGap, is pleased companies are beginning to see this reporting as normal business practice.
"It’s a really fundamental first step in eliminating that last stubborn bit of our pay gaps,” she says.
Pay gaps exist when groups of employees receive significantly different pay, usually between groups of gender and ethnicities. This is measured in a number of ways, usually by calculating median or average pay.
Stuart says New Zealand is about a decade behind other comparable countries when tackling the issue. In the United Kingdom, for instance, some employers are required to gather and report data on the topic.
The latest data from the UK Office for National Statistics says the gender pay gap has been declining slowly over time, falling by about a quarter during the last decade from about 20 to 15 percent.
Back home, the latest Statistics New Zealand data shows the gender pay gap is sitting at about 9 percent, after remaining relatively flat during the last five years.
In future, Stuart is hoping to see more than 100 businesses on the register, with the Government working with the private sector to develop a standard reporting process for providing information on the pay gap.
Honesty is the best policy
Among those in avid support of transparency is Marc England, chief executive of energy company Genesis.
England says it's only from digging into the data and exploring any nuances that discussion and meaningful change can occur.
“We have to have a really honest discussion about what the causes are of the gap, if we are going to solve it. If you don’t know what your gap is, it’s just kind of brushed under the carpet,” he says.
Three markers are measured at Genesis – the gender pay gap between female and male staff, the pay equity gap between staff in like-for-like roles, and the leadership progression gap, which looks at the make-up of leaders at the company.
The company has laid bare its 35 percent pay gap between female and male staff, but in contrast, the difference between people in like-for-like roles is just 1.7 percent.
England says this exposes the differences between who has what job. At Genesis, most of the seats in the contact centre are filled by women, while men dominate engineering and operational roles.
“We do really need more companies to disclose. That's the bottom line. We just can't solve it all as one company. It's going to require collective action,” – Marc England, Genesis chief executive
“Those operational roles tend to have longer tenures, so men have been in the job for 20, 30, or 40 years. They tend to be technically qualified and on higher salaries,” England says
“Whereas the women in our contact centre have probably been in the job sometimes five years. They tend to be low-paid, partly because of tenure and partly because of job type.”
England’s conclusion is women need to be encouraged to pursue technical qualifications, while companies need to support them in their progression up the ladder, in an effort that will take collaboration between government, education institutions, and the private sector.
In the meantime, England wants other companies to follow suit.
“We do really need more companies to disclose. That's the bottom line. We just can't solve it all as one company. It's going to require collective action,” he says.
“There’s no downside to being transparent and acknowledging that we’ve had a problem. We’ve not had an investor say, ‘Oh we can’t invest in Genesis because they’ve got a 35 percent gender pay gap. There’s only upsides and allowing us to have conversations that allow us to fix the problems,” he says.
Mandates no substitute for momentum
Theresa Gattung, chair of AIA Insurance and advocacy group Global Women, calls the new registry “good news” for women in the workforce.
“It shows more and more chief executives, and senior management teams and boards, are wanting to do the right thing,” she says.
Without transparency, Gattung says it’s hard for companies and their employees to know whether salaires are equal for similar roles.
Recording and sharing this data also helps companies measure their response to occupational segregation, where women end up in jobs that pay less and hold fewer prospects.
But she doesn’t think mandatory reporting - such as the case in the UK or Australia - is the magic answer.
“I absolutely think that would up the ante, but it has to have enough momentum in the private sector and enough companies who want to do the right thing,” Gattung says.
“Otherwise, if you just mandated it without a groundswell of support, it might not have as much impact as you would like it to have.”
ASB is among the companies who are revealing their data for the first time.
The bank’s data shows women make up 38 percent of the employees in the bank’s highest pay band, but 73 percent of those in the lowest bracket.
Chief executive Vittoria Shortt points out the company has hit its target of having women in 40 percent of their leadership roles, but she says the bank has more work to do.
She says women are generally attracted to roles in the contact centre and branches as the schedules fit around looking after children and school pick-ups, but the bank is focused on building up the pipeline of female talent to fill senior executive roles.
Aside from being the right thing to do, she thinks working towards eliminating pay gaps creates a more inclusive environment.
“If they don’t feel like they belong to an organisation, they’re not going to do their best work and they won’t stay,” she says.
“At the heart of any business are people. There’s a lot of analysis that you can get around commercial returns and all of that, but I think fundamentally you’ve just got to believe in it.”
