Te Papa's gender pay gap grows worse

Thursday, 18 February 2021

The gender pay gap at Te Papa continues to grow, however the museum’s executive staff say this is because it’s hiring more young women in low-skilled positions.

Te Papa’s annual report from 2019/2020 said the gender pay gap grew to 21.59 per cent in 2020, up from 20.45 per cent in 2019 – more than double the national gender pay gap of 9.50 per cent.

“It is very much at the front of our mind,' Te Papa tumu whakarae Courtney Johnston told a select committee earlier this week.

“In fact, it’s something we were discussing in our leadership meeting this morning and as we look into our budget next year and the year after … these are concerns that we’re taking into those conversations.”

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Courtney Johnston, Te Papa tumu whakarae, says the issue is at the front of the museum’s mind.

While the report said the pay gap was the result of Te Papa’s commercial activity expansion, and greater employment of a greater number of women in low-skilled positions, Johnston told the committee that was only a contributing factor.

“Our large casual workforce working largely in hospitality roles tends to be dominated by young women, so their pay rate compared to the permanent fulltime long-service staff is causing one of those inequities.”

The report said the gap was “an area of concern” for the museum, and further review would be undertaken over 2021 to investigate it further, with more in-depth analysis to be done on other benchmarks such as occupation and ethnicity.

Te Papa spokeswoman Pania Shingleton said the museum had a bicultural approach to leadership and direction with Johnston in the tumu whakarae role and Dr Arapata Hakiwai in the kaihautū role also leading Te Papa.

Te Papa employs a large amount of casual staff in low-skill roles it says are more likely to be women.

The museum’s leadership tiers by gender remained “fairly equal”, Shingleton said, including equal numbers of women/men managers at level two (three apiece), women outnumbering men 13-11 in the level three managerial tier, and men outnumbering women 13-12 in the level four tier.

“With our bicultural leadership and roughly equal numbers of females and males on the executive leadership team and other management tiers, Te Papa is in a healthy gender leadership position,” she said.

However, Shingleton said that did not erase concerns about the overall gender pay gap.

In the 2019/20 year, the museum employed 384 permanent or fixed-term staff, and 232 casual staff.

There were more casual staff in lower-skilled positions such as hospitality workers and visitor hosts who were women, Shingleton said.

The museum was unable to share information on pay gaps which may exist between staff of different ethnicities.

According to the Ministry for Women, while the gender pay gap has reduced since 1998, it’s stalled in the last decade.

The ministry said causes of the gender pay gap were “complex”, but the majority (80 per cent) were driven by factors like conscious and unconscious bias which impacted negatively on women’s recruitment and pay advancement.

Only 20 per cent of the gender pay gap was attributable to factors like differences in education, the occupations and industries that men and women worked in, or the fact women were more likely to work part-time.