After 50 years of foot-dragging let’s close the gender pay gap

Ican still vividly recall the jubilant celebrations of 50 years ago, when Parliament passed the Equal Pay Act. In October 1972, I was a passionate young women’s liberationist, and a member of the Auckland Council for Equal Pay and Opportunity – an organisation that had been lobbying for equal pay for women workers since 1957.

At that stage, it was legal to set different pay rates for men and women and to exclude women from many types of work. The female minimum wage was 65% less than the male minimum wage. There was a separate ‘‘women’s rate’’ in more than 200 employment awards and job advertisements were segregated into men’s and women’s jobs.

The justification for all this was that men were ‘‘breadwinners’’, who needed to be paid enough to keep a wife and two or three children, while women, at that time, were not expected (or even, in many cases, allowed) to work after marriage.

By the 1970s, however, more and more women were entering the workforce and the idea that men should be paid more than women for doing the same work could no longer be justified.

So we were elated when the legislation was passed and naively assumed that equal pay for women would happen automatically as soon as the legislation came into force, making it unlawful to pay men and women differently for doing the same work.

However, our hopes were quickly dashed as it became obvious that the Equal Pay Act lacked teeth. Penalties for breaching the law were low and there wasn’t any requirement that employers make adjustments to ensure female employees catch up with their male colleagues or ensure they were equitably paid.

And that’s why the gap between men’s and women’s wages has persisted for the past half century (despite recent amendments to the law) and remains at an abysmal 9.1% – and more than 27% when the pay of a Pa¯ keha¯ male is compared with a Pasifika woman.

Clearly, we need other tools, like transparency and mandatory pay gap reporting, if we are ever to close the gender pay gap.

International experience has shown that the simple act of requiring organisations to report publicly on their pay gap significantly reduces the gap.

The 50th anniversary of the passing of the Equal Pay act, in October this year, would be an appropriate time to put an end to 50 years of foot-dragging and for the government to introduce a law that would make it mandatory for all organisations to publicly report their gender pay gap, so that everyone in Aotearoa New Zealand is paid fairly for their work.