Businesses should be named and shamed for paying women less than men for performing like-for-like roles and fostering a work culture of pay secrecy, leading professionals have said ahead of International Women’s Day.
Emerald Group CEO Diane Foreman said she has “never, ever paid a woman less than a man. I pay for the role. It just is beyond my field of comprehension that that doesn’t happen. If you want the best person, the salary is there for the role to attract them.”
Hosted by The Law Association (TLA), the prominent businesswoman joined criminal barrister and TLA Vice President Julie-Anne Kincade KC, Reserve Bank of New Zealand Assistant Governor Juliet Tainui-Hernandez, Simpson Grierson partner Sarah Mitchell, criminal barrister and TLA council member Samira Taghavi and MinterEllisonRuddWatts partner June Hardacre to explore issues on the theme of “Shaping the future: women’s rights across professions and borders”.
Foreman, whose decades-long experience in business has seen her be named the New Zealand country winner for EY’s Entrepreneur of the Year in 2009 and by Forbes magazine as one of the most powerful women in Asia in 2014, sympathised with other women who had experienced unequal pay “because it shouldn’t be [the case]. We need to call those businesses out – and I mean really call them out. People need to be humiliated and shamed when they make those kinds of calls.”
New Zealand’s laws weren’t helping the situation. Hardacre, an employment law specialist, pointed to Australia where the introduction of pay secrecy laws in 2023 has made it illegal for employers to insert clauses within employment agreements barring employees from discussing their remuneration with colleagues. In New Zealand, pay secrecy remains a legally accepted practice.
“[There are] two ways you can combat this very present issue: anti-pay secrecy laws and mandatory pay gap reporting,” Hardacre said. “Name it and shame it.”
How do you know?
Other gaps existed. “Our pay equity framework is broken. There are hundreds of cases caught up in our Employment Relations Authority that aren’t being progressed. We don’t have modern slavery legislation to try to combat the very real presence of modern slavery in our society, which impacts ethnic minorities and women,” Hardacre said.
“And our parental leave – frankly, our holiday pay treatment of women and people who return from parental leave is discriminatory. It takes them 52 weeks’ prior earnings to spit out what you’re earning if you’re taking a holiday a year after you return from leave. Now, I’m not good at maths but if you take a year off and you need to take a day of annual leave, your annual leave entitlement is virtually zero. It’s just straight discrimination,” she said.
Kincade shared that a doctor friend of hers had insisted on a certain pay level when she started a new job, based on knowing someone, who was doing the same role, was getting more than she had been offered. The employer asked the doctor how she knew about the other person’s salary “and she said, ‘Because he’s my husband’”, Kincade said. “It was only because of that feature that she was able to insist upon getting the same rate of pay as a doctor.”
Hardacre said unequal pay was “endemic” throughout New Zealand business.
We don’t have the comfort to say ‘this man – my husband – is getting paid more’ [or] ‘my colleague has been offered more’ because what is the first thing that comes out of that? You’ve breached your confidentiality obligations and ‘we will call you into a disciplinary meeting’.
June Hardacre
“We’ve created a culture of taboo around just saying ‘I deserve to be paid x because this is what x is doing and we are valued at the same role’,” Hardacre said.
Iran and rights
Asked how New Zealand was leading the way in upholding human rights, Taghavi shared her experience of growing up in Iran. “When it comes to the word ‘rights’ and Iran, they don’t work together well,” she said, adding that a global gender pay gap report from June 2023 ranked Iran 143rd out of 146 countries in the world. “You can really imagine how badly we’re doing.”
In Iran, there is no rule of law. Women don’t have any rights,
Samira Taghavi
When Iranians reach puberty, they are deemed to be adults and can therefore be held criminally responsible.
For girls, the age of criminal liability is nine; for boys, it’s 15. Men can divorce their wives as of right without any reason. Mothers are entitled to keep their daughters until the age of seven and their sons until the age of two. “Once you get to that age, as of right, the kid will go to the father,” she said. “It’s just absolutely shocking.”
The instances of fundamental rights being treated as political footballs in New Zealand scared Taghavi. “Coming from Iran, it’s always a slippery slope,” she said. “Most of my mentors when I started at university in Iran when I was 17, 18 – they’re either dead or they’ve been executed, or they have committed suicide, or they are still in prison from 20 years ago.”
New Zealand could still do better, she said. Frequently, she hears complaints from people in her practice area of criminal law about the ill-treatment they receive from senior professionals, some of whom are women. A person’s first few years in work are the most crucial because “you can either make them interested or you can make them hate what they’re doing”, Taghavi said. “I still haven’t found a solution apart from telling these young lawyers either to move on or try to help them find something else…I’m hoping that something is going to change in the near future.”
Targets and goals
The panellists discussed other topics, including their experiences with innovative strategies that have elevated women into leadership roles. Tainui-Hernandez, from Ngāi Tahu – Ōnuku and Te Whakatōhea, said targets helped as “what gets measured gets managed”. One of the first things that the assistant governor said she looked at when she arrived at the Reserve Bank in 2020 was its workforce data. A target of 40% men, 40% women and 20% of any gender, at all levels of employment, was set in line with Champions of Change, a group of more than 80 leading CEOs and board chairs trying to accelerate inclusive and diverse leadership in New Zealand’s workplaces.
Once the target was reached, the central bank would look at how it could get more women into, for example, the central banking team and also the upper tiers of leadership. “Just understanding that has helped us to tailor initiatives to improve that,” Tainui-Hernandez said, sharing that the central bank ran its first women leadership programme in 2023 with 20 high-performing women in middle management roles. Across 12 months, the bank looked at what support it could offer to ready them for promotions as they came through. “We’ve got a big chunk of promotion-ready women to move through to the leadership, which will ultimately help the gender pay gap that we’ve got at the moment.”
Mitchell said that Simpson Grierson’s board in 2013 decided to set a goal of wanting a fifth of its partners, by 2020, to be women. The firm ended up “smashing” its goal – last year, nearly 40% were female, and the percentage was increasing. “People often talk badly about targets and how promotion should be by merit,” she said, mentioning a message she had recently heard from a diversity and inclusion speaker that “merit is in the eyes of the beholder”.
Setting a goal of having more women leaders wouldn’t discount people who otherwise would have been promoted or those people promoted before they were ready or might not have deserved their promotion compared to somebody else, Mitchell said. “What it is, is looking at who we need in our senior levels and what can we do to get them there.”
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