My lesson in gender equality

One legal case changed how Charlotte Doyle looks at the world.

During my leavers assembly at high school, our principal issued us a warning – we should be prepared to fight for our rights as women. At the time, her cautionary words didn’t stick.

We had heard speeches from previous students who had played hockey at the Olympics, read the news on RNZ, or were on their way to deliver legal advice at The Hague. I crafted lofty career ambitions for myself under the assumption that all of them were within my reach if I simply worked hard enough.

Fast forward to my fourth year of university and I’m sitting in the library scrolling through news articles as a break from law exam study, clicking on a news story about gender pay equality. The headline read: “Landmark ruling in fight over pay discrimination”.

An aged care worker, Kristine Bartlett, had argued in the Employment Court that her low wages ($13.75 per hour) were discriminatory because they were lower than if men were performing her work. She and her female co-workers were not receiving equal pay for work of equal value, or pay equity.

Bartlett’s employers argued that only comparisons between wages paid to men and women performing the same work in the same industry were possible.

This idea was unfamiliar. Some wider reading explained that it compares the skills, responsibility and training between men and women performing different work and whether they receive unequal wages. A common example is between nurses and police officers.

Equal pay is a different concept altogether from pay equity; it compares wages paid to men and women with the same job titles. Bartlett’s employers argued that only comparisons between wages paid to men and women performing the same work in the same industry were possible. They claimed that to be legally forced to provide equal pay for work of equal value would risk financial ruin for the aged care sector.

The Employment Court disagreed. Comparing the issue to the abolishment of slavery, it held that a failure to allow for pay equity claims would perpetuate systemic discrimination against entire occupations dominated by women.

The court found that, in the interests of advancing progress on gender inequality, low paid female-dominated jobs could be matched to similar male-dominated ones in entirely different industries.  For the first time in New Zealand’s history, a claim for pay equity was possible.

Until then, the idea of systemic discrimination against women was a foreign concept to me. My generation did not witness first-hand the ground-breaking struggles for gender equality of the 1960s and 1970s. Yet we have been fortunate enough to enjoy the ongoing benefits.

Helen Clark’s time as Prime Minister spanned my formative childhood and teenage years. My parents have the same professional qualifications. My two brothers and I have had the same opportunities.  By the time I went to university, explicit discrimination against individual women in a workplace had largely become socially and legally unacceptable in New Zealand. To think about gender inequality on an occupational scale and in an indirect, systemic form therefore came as a shock.

This epiphany was now three years ago. Since then the Employment Court’s decision has been upheld by the Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court. Bartlett’s success triggered a wave of hundreds of other claims from similar working sectors, including nurses, midwives and teachers. It exposed a need for equal pay for work of equal value in New Zealand’s workforce.

At the same time, the gender pay gap has been increasing. Statistics New Zealand reported in June 2016 that the gap was sitting at 12 percent, compared with 9.9 percent in 2014.

A root cause of this stubborn inequality is occupational segregation. Cleaning, teaching and caring are skills that have long been presumed to come “naturally” to women. Rather than enabling women to become breadwinners, these abilities have traditionally confined women to domesticity. Often called “women’s work”, society has long attributed these skills with a low economic value.

As my peers and I have started to enter the workforce ourselves, the remaining challenges to women being valued equally would slowly, and dishearteningly, start to reveal themselves.

By studying law, I followed in the footsteps of my grandfather. There were no women in his law classes in the late 1950s. Almost 60 years later, the girls outnumbered the guys in mine. By contrast, the main jobs open to my grandmother were teaching, nursing or healthcare. She trained as a primary school teacher and then a dental nurse. She enjoyed taking care of children and their teeth, but she tells stories of walking hours in the freezing Dunedin cold because she couldn’t afford public transport. That money needed to be saved to pay rent.

New Zealand has rightfully since earned an international reputation for achieving progress on gender equality. Women now have more educational, political and social opportunities than ever before. After leaving school, my mother tossed up between pursuing architecture or medicine. She decided to become a doctor and earned a Master’s in Public Health and specialise as a paediatrician. Some years later, after changing tack, she achieved another Master’s degree, this time in Art History. Her friends followed similar paths. Highly qualified women were my immediate role models.

At university, many of my friends had (like me) either attended co-ed schools, had sisters, had grown up with a working professional mother, or all of the above. The active assertion of women’s rights wasn’t as alive in our minds as it had been in the past. In recent decades, both Labour and National governments alike have heralded such advancements for women as evidence that gender inequality was being eradicated.

However, as my peers and I have started to enter the workforce ourselves, the remaining challenges to women being valued equally would slowly, and dishearteningly, start to reveal themselves.

The root causes of gender inequality have persisted. In 2016, women continue to be over-represented in low-paid jobs as nurses, teachers and carers - this occupational segregation accounts for over 30 percent of the overall gender pay gap. Assumptions regarding women and their social and economic value are still ingrained in a system that largely favours full-time work, traditionally masculine approaches to work and perpetuates biases against women having children.

One generation is not long enough to shift deep-seated attitudes.

There are however currently signs that a new push for more change is finally igniting. Late last year the government accepted a set of recommendations from a Working Group that had been set up in the wake of the Bartlett case. Legal changes will see equal pay for work of equal value finally become an economic and social reality across New Zealand’s workplaces for future generations.

To my frustration and sadness, I have learned that the forms of equality I enjoy cannot be taken for granted. As Bartlett’s case has revealed, much of the battle for true equality remains; a battle that runs far deeper than breaking a glass ceiling.

Hopefully there will be young women in the near future who are not told that they still have to fight or to “play the game”. Instead, the rules of the “game” would have finally adjusted to suit them and their valuable attributes.