Businesses told to look deeper to confront biases that limit women's pay

Friday, 18 August 2017

Susan Doughty says firms have to 'peel the onion' to work out what their gender pay discrepancies are.

Nicola Richardson describes her role at Genesis Energy as that of a circuit-breaker, stopping unconscious biases creating a pay gap between men and women.

She is the company's executive general manager of people and culture, and is leading its new Minding the Gap policy, which aims to remove any gender pay gap within the organisation.

Nicola Richardson says Genesis is working hard to address any unreasonable pay gaps.

She said Genesis was just at the start of the pay equity process, but it was learning fast. Richardson is a speaker at Global Women's 1 Day for Change event this year.

Minding the Gap involved looking at what men and women were paid on the basis of medians, and then how they made up each salary band.

Women are still paid less in NZ. What is it going to take to balance the scales?

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But she said that was only a cursory measure – the company then had to 'go underneath' and look at how people were performing, how long they had been in their roles and the pay progression they had been through, to work out whether pay differences were fair.

They would compare people in similar roles, with similar experience and qualifications.

The company's customer service team was predominantly women in entry-level roles, she said, while the technicians at power plants were mostly male and had specialist skills. Navigating those differences to determine what was fair would be part of the work.

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Genesis is just finishing the first round of the programme and will report to the board and its HR and remuneration committee.

Richardson said the programme had uncovered gender differences. 'Some are reasonable and some are not. The unreasonable ones are the ones I'm placing huge focus on.'

She hoped, by making people aware of unconscious factors that might influence their recruitment decisions, they could eliminate them.

New Zealand has a 12 per cent gender pay gap between men and women.

Only 20 per cent of that can be explained by differences in skills and experience, occupation or the impact of women taking time out for caregiving, according to Government research. The rest is deemed to 'unexplained'.

The pay gaps for Māori, Pasifika and immigrant women, and for women with disabilities, are higher. Māori women are paid only 76 per cent of what men receive, while Pasifika women earn only 69.9 per cent of male earnings.

'That gap is not in fact unexplained. It is attributable to discrimination. Employers frequently continue to pay men more than they pay women, irrespective of merit,' said lawyer Catriona MacLennan.

She said it was also misleading to argue that women were choosing lower-paid jobs.

'Women are over-represented in many low-paying jobs. These jobs are crucial to the functioning of our community – for example, caregiving. If women left these jobs tomorrow and only took high-paying jobs, there would be no one to care for the elderly and carry out other essential work.'

Some of the biggest gender pay gaps are among the higher-paid workers. Female chartered accountants earn an average of $45,573 less every year than their male counterparts.The engineering sector also reported a pay gap of $15,000 between men and women working full-time.

Susan Doughty, a partner in people advisory services at EY and another Global Women speaker, said businesses that wanted to improve their pay equity would need to start with good data.

It could sometimes look as though a business did not have a problem because there was only a small gap between average wages, she said.

But that broad-brush approach would miss the detail of how fairly workers were being treated on a like-for-like basis.'I call it peeling the onion, understanding what are the underlying influences? Not only what the pay difference is but what are the factors that contribute to that?'

She said businesses should use a 'gender lens' to consider decisions such as pay rises based on performance, performance ratings, or promotions.

'Until we get more females in to higher-paying jobs we will always have this pay gap. To my way of thinking it goes right back to schools. How are we talking to young women about what their career opportunities are?'

She said businesses should look for instances where men were starting on higher salaries and progressing faster, more men in senior roles, more men in the types of roles that led to senior roles and slower career progression for those who had had career breaks or worked part-time.

They should also look at how workplaces could be made more inclusive, embracing flexibility and work-life balance, so women did not have to 'opt out and get a call centre job' when they had families.

She said organisations never set out to deliberately pay women less. 'Most are shocked and say 'no, not us'. But you peel the onion a bit and the unconscious biases come in. The way females are treated relative to males… maybe they didn't negotiate as well, they didn't get the same pay increase with the same performance rating. It keeps adding up.'

She said getting it right was good for businesses, their brands and their people.

* Registrations for Global Women's 1 Day for Change summit on 19 September are now open, and places are filling fast. Find out more, view the speakers and buy your ticket at http://globalwomen.org.nz/1dfcnz