Tackling gender bias in business: How Deloitte closed its gender pay gap

Thursday, 12 July 2018

Adithi Pandit is a partner at Deloitte New Zealand. She will be speaking about the future of work at Festival for the Future 2018.

Workers who display stereotypically feminine traits like politeness can be judged harshly in the workplace, one young leader says.

Adithi Pandit, a partner at Deloitte, said a review of staff salaries in her company's consulting department showed, 122 years after suffragist Kate Sheppard first pushed for equal pay, there were still inequities at Kiwi businesses.

The 2017 review showed despite Deloitte having clear policies on gender inequality, male business consulting employees were, on average, earning more than their female colleagues.

'Even though we were being totally fair based on their performance rating, we still had a gap,' Pandit said.

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The reason for that became clear after management analysed how it assessed employees' performance, she said.

Vanisa Dhiru, the president of the National Council of Women of New Zealand.

'We realised this was because we were rating women more harshly than men.'

Pandit's department reviewed the words that managers who evaluated staff associated with high performance.

Kate Sheppard first advanced the idea of pay equality in New Zealand in the 1800s.

It found people who were described as 'assertive' and 'ambitious' – qualities associated with masculinity – were consistently rated as better performers than those who were viewed as 'supportive', 'polite' or 'collaborative', which were considered 'feminine' traits, Pandit said.

'When a guy takes his team out for beers everyone goes 'what a great leader'. When a woman brings baking in for morning tea, no one goes 'what a great leader'. That actually has to shift.'

After that was revealed, it educated its workforce on what high performance looked like in women compared with men.

By the next round of performance reviews in June this year, the company's consulting division had closed the gender pay gap, Pandit said.

Pandit, 37, is one of several female business leaders set to speak at Festival for the Future, an annual conference for millennials which will be held in Wellington from July 27-29.

This year's event coincides with the 125th anniversary of a key milestone in the suffragist movement – when a petition of more 25,000 signatures appealing for women to have the right to vote was submitted to Parliament.

Vanisa Dhiru, the president of the National Council of Women of New Zealand, said while New Zealand had made good progress combating gender inequities since then, statistics on family violence, pay parity and women in leadership positions illustrated more needed to be done.

'We are nowhere near being equal.The root cause of some of those problems are actually around the attitudes of some of those people that are around the decision making table that enable or disable women to progress in society.'

Dhiru said the fact the gender pay gap was still an issue showed further change was required.

Sheppard, commonly seen as the face of the suffragist movement, first pushed for equal pay for women when she helped found the National Council of Women in 1896, she said.

'We are still talking about that at a legislative level with our Government 122 years later.'

Alexia Hilbertidou, the founder of GirlBoss New Zealand which aims to encourage girls to pursue careers in science, engineering, technology, mathematics and entrepreneurship (STEM), said one of the most significant challenges facing New Zealand was the under representation of young women in STEM.

'If we look at the 2017 Future of Jobs report by the World Economic Forum, we can see that the industries which are going to be the most impacted by automation, for example retail and administration, are currently largely dominated by women,' she said.

'The World Economic Forum report predicts that unless we take strong action to close the gender gap in [STEM and entrepreneurship], we can expect growing social and gender inequity as well as mass unemployment for women.'

Go to festivalforthefuture.org.nz for more information on the event.