Expert shares her insights on gender inequality
Women in New Zealand’s finance industry earn significantly less than men, according to a new study by Mind the Gap.
Females working at the Bank of New Zealand on average earned 30.5% less than their male colleagues.
The voluntary public pay gap registry Mind the Gap, which operated the mindtehgap.nz website, identified each company’s name, name of the board chair, chief executive, and whether the company was reporting their pay gaps along with links to further details.
The registry is open to all New Zealand businesses, reporting on their employee data within the last 18 months.
The Mind the Gap campaign focused on identifying groups of larger organisations in NZ and approached large organisations to take part to close the gap. According to Stats NZ, women on average earned 9.1% less than men in 2021.
The list highlighted telco Spark had the largest gender pay gap of companies listed outside of the banks, with women earning 28% less than their male colleagues.
Managing director of Strategic Pay, Cathy Hendry (pictured), said gender pay gap figures of between 20% and 30% at major banks were not a surprise.
“A large chunk of what we are seeing is vertical segregations where females and males are sitting within an organisation,” Hendry said. “The split between females and males are across their average earnings and separate the organisations into groups.”
Hendry said she found it interesting that many banks had a strong female representation across senior levels, however it was not uniform across all industries.
Across the finance industry there were more men in high salaried specialist roles, while more women were based in call centres and customer facing roles, which created a gender imbalance in the overall data.
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“Organisations are now actively addressing pay gaps amongst women and men at the different levels and paying both the same if they are working in the same roles,” she said.
Hendry believed equal representation amongst genders in the workplace needed to be at the forefront of the financial industry.
“What we find is women are more likely to end up in lower paying sectors such as health and the representation of women within this industry compared to a higher paying sector is outweighed. Despite some pushback from CEOs in larger industries, some are still known to be paying males and females differently,” Hendry said.
The New Zealand government was pushing to close the gap, however New Zealand was lagging on a global scale as it was not mandatory to report on pay discrepancies and supporters of the campaign want to know why.
“The government are doing a lot in trying to advocate their own organisations but not with private sectors and sectors outside of the government control,” Hendry said.
“If we report the problem, it will get measured and then resolved. It will provide a positive impact across the New Zealand financial workforce. Let’s start measuring and let’s start doing something about it.”
Businesses can continue to report and register their pay gaps and the registry will be updated monthly.
