#EightPercentMatters: Kiwi women effectively working for free from 2:38pm today

30 November 2023

#EightPercentMatters

Today we are calling on all New Zealanders to reflect on the role they can play in closing the gender pay gap with our “Eight Percent Matters” campaign.

Year on year, New Zealand’s gender gap has decreased by 0.6%, moving from 9.2% in 2022, to 8.6% this year. This is a positive shift, but it has only decreased the pay gap by 52 hours and 32 minutes in real terms.

This inequality is even worse for women of colour, with the pay gap between all men and Wāhine Māori, and between all men and Pasifika women sitting substantially higher at 14.2% and 15.2% respectively. This equates to Wāhine Māori having been “working for free” from November Thursday November 9th and Pasifika women from November 6th.

Although the year-on-year trends point to New Zealand making progress in closing its gender pay gap, the “Eight Percent Matters” campaign serves as a reminder to New Zealand society that although the pay gap figures may be seemingly small, they still have a significant impact on women’s lives.

“The year-on-year figures show positive signs that our gender pay gaps are closing. However, we can’t become complacent, as the gap won’t continue to close without sustained, intentional action, notes Theresa Gattung, Chair of Global Women.

“As a country we have come a long way in recognising the latent value of a diverse, equitable and inclusive workforce; however, the existence of the pay gap means more needs to be done.

“We want New Zealanders to use this day to talk about topics like pay equity and pay transparency with those around them – whether it’s asking HR about your organisations pay gap to revisiting your DE&I strategy in a leadership meeting. We need to keep challenging ourselves to do better until there is no pay gap to talk about.”

VISIT OUR CAMPAIGN PAGE FOR MORE

This #NoPayDay, we want to encourage organisations and individuals to:

1. Report and monitor their organisations pay gap: Unless organisations are aware of their current pay parity status – when it comes to both gender and ethnicity – they can’t fully understand the changes that need to be made. Organisations need to make a commitment to scrutinise and monitor any existing pay gaps and then make a plan to correct them.

2. Be transparent from day one: If salaries are kept secret this will often result with people being remunerated different amounts for the same job, in turn stifling social mobility and fuelling systemic inequalities. A progressive step to take here is to state a salary when recruiting. By advertising a role with a clear salary band this helps break the cycle on both gender and ethnic pay gaps – it will also stop you inheriting a pay gap from a candidate’s previous employer.

3. Join our movement and set your out of office: To drive conversation on the day we will be encouraging our members and networks to mark the day by setting their out of office message in line with our campaign. See here for a text template you can use. 

 

Calculating dates and times:

To calculate the dates and times official gender pay gap figures as sourced from Statistics New Zealand and overlaid them with the days of the year.

  • 8.6% of 365 (how many days in the year) is 31.39 days
  • 365 – 31.39 days is 333.61 days. This means the last day the average women is paid compared to men is the 333nd day of the year – which is November 29th.
  • Which means some time through the 334th day of the year – Thurs Nov 30th , women are working for free when compared to their male counterparts
  • Specifically – this means that at 61% through the 334th day of the year as women are only paid for 333.61 of the year women begin working for free from 2:38pm on Thursday 30th of November

Find reference data on the Ministry of Women’s website: