Pay equity: Enough with the slurs, now for some facts

Monday, 12 May 2025

“Let’s get a few things straight: No woman has had her pay cut,” says Nicola Willis.

Nicola Willis is the Minister of Finance

OPINION: Having the C-word directed at me by a journalist in a mainstream publication wasn’t on my bingo-list for Mother’s Day 2025. Nor was being accused of “girl-math”.

But there you have it, that’s what was thrown at me and my female colleagues in a recent newspaper column as hopelessly devoid of facts as it was heavy on sexist slurs.

We can look past the childish insults – what really bothers us are the deeply misleading statements being made by many following the Government’s changes to the process for progressing pay equity settlements.

So let’s get a few things straight about the Government’s law changes.

First, the right to equal pay remains as it ever was. Equal pay has been protected in New Zealand law since 1973. It’s the simple concept that a woman doing the same job as a man should get the same pay. Nothing has changed there. I’d resign my job before I’d let that happen.

Second, no woman has had her pay cut. Twelve existing pay equity settlements including for nurses, social workers, midwives, teacher aides, school librarians, care and support workers and a range of other female-dominated workforces remain. Those settlements resulted in higher pay for tens of thousands of women, and they continue to be funded by the Government, at a cost of around $1.8 billion a year. Our Government values those workers and none of them should be scared into thinking their pay is at risk. It’s not.

Third, additional pay equity settlements for further workforces are expected under the Government’s improved pay equity regime. In fact, the Government is so certain that there will be future pay equity settlements that we have set aside large amounts of funding for them in the Budget. We fully expect other women-dominated workforces to be getting pay-equity driven pay rises in future.

So why all the vitriol?

It’s clear people are choosing to weaponise the concept of pay equity by conflating it with all number of other issues, including those that should be dealt with through standard pay negotiations.

PSA organiser Sarah Proctor-Thomson, left with care worker Amanda Gordon after Gordon spoke to a crowd of around 2000 people at the 1903 site in Trafalgar St, Nelson protesting the introduction of the Pay Equity Law.

Unlike equal pay which compares men and women doing the same job, pay equity is about recognising and correcting for the fact that some female-dominated workforces have been historically underpaid and undervalued due to sex-based discrimination. Our Government supports that principle.

The tricky bit is how to define in law what jobs are of ‘equal value’ and how we work out which aspects of pay are down to sex-discrimination and what are the result of other market-based factors.

The first pay-equity claim was proved in the Supreme Court by Kristine Bartlett on behalf of thousands of care and support workers. In response, the last National Government delivered the first ever pay-equity settlement in New Zealand. It then moved quickly to design a clear legal regime so that other claims could be progressed without workers having to resort to the courts.

In 2020, a full three years later, Labour finally got around to putting its own, very loose, regime into law. Unfortunately, like almost everything Labour got its hands on, the system got way out of whack and became completely unaffordable; admin workers were being compared with civil engineers; social workers were being compared with detectives; and librarians were being compared with fisheries officers. Multiple employers were being joined to claims and some had dozens of very different jobs in scope.

The finance minister was questioned in the House about statements offered by National and ACT MPs about the legislation.

What started as a pay equity regime had become a Trojan Horse for a multi-billion dollar grievance industry driven by public sector unions. It had departed a very long way from issues of sex-discrimination.

What the Government did last week was put in law a much more workable pay equity regime that focuses squarely on the actual issue of sex-based discrimination, setting out a transparent process through which employers and employees can negotiate the question of equal value.

Yes, these changes mean the Government has been able to unwind a blow-out in costs that Treasury had been forecasting. The simple fact is that Labour’s broken regime had a hidden, exploding and ultimately unaffordable price tag. Sticking with it would have meant large new taxes, reckless amounts of borrowing or significant spending cuts elsewhere.

Yes, fixing Labour’s flawed regime has released billions of dollars that we can now invest in this and future Budgets. Yes, that will mean there is more funding available for things like cancer drugs, new schools, new hospitals and other much needed initiatives. Yes, that means our Government won’t have to tax and borrow even more to balance the Budget. You can call that ‘girl-math’, I call it facing-up to financial reality.

I’m a feminist, I wear the badge proudly and I’ve upheld those values throughout our Cabinet’s consideration of pay equity issues. I’m up for a debate on how to define sex-based discrimination, but I’m not up for misleading rhetoric and seeing women MPs having their gender weaponised against them and their views dismissed. All our daughters deserve better.