Is New Zealand a Post-Feminist Paradise?

Is New Zealand a Post-Feminist Paradise? By Rebecca Stringer Cite as: Rebecca Stringer, ‘Is New Zealand a Post-Feminist Paradise?’ in Claire Freeman and Michelle Thompson-Fawcett eds. Living Together: Towards sustainable settlements in New Zealand (Dunedin: University of Otago Press, 2005): 77-91. Is New Zealand a Post-Feminist Paradise? Introduction At a conference in the United States recently I was intrigued to hear New Zealand described as a “post-feminist paradise”. Rightly, this term implies a contrast between the current period and the period between 1970 and the mid1980s when New Zealand society hosted mass political movement in the name of women’s liberation. And the term ‘post-feminist’ seems intuitively correct when one contrasts the kinds of life choices now available to women with earlier periods in which women’s choices evidently were heavily constrained. If feminism is at least in part about improving women’s chances to become fullyfledged actors within the public sphere, we might be persuaded that ‘postfeminist’ applies to contemporary New Zealand given the number of women in key government positions, the increased involvement of women in all areas and echelons of the paid workforce, and the state’s provision of forms of income support such as Paid Parental Leave and the Domestic Purposes Benefit designed primarily with women’s socio-economic interests in mind. While it is clear that feminism has been a powerful and influential force in this country, it nonetheless is the case that ‘post-feminist’ is a deceptive descriptor when used to imply that the central issues New Zealand’s women’s liberation movements have sought to raise and remedy are in fact behind us, having already been resolved. Women remain overrepresented as victims of sexual and domestic violence, and 50 per cent of all homicides of New Zealand women are committed by the woman’s current or former partner (Ministry of Women’s Affairs, 2002: 138). Despite the many women in key government positions, parliament as a whole still hosts a minority of female representatives: 29 per cent following the 2002 election. Theresa Gattung may be the highest paid CEO in the country ($2.82 million per annum), but women hold only 5 per cent of board directorships in NZX (New Zealand’s stock exchange) companies, and 16 per cent in NZAX companies (New Zealand’s alternative market, for small/medium and non-standard companies) (Human Rights Commission, 2004: 12). And as we will see in this chapter, New Zealand women as a group still garner a significantly lesser share of income from paid employment than their male counterparts. Concentrating on the issue of inequality in the sphere of Is New Zealand a Post-Feminist Paradise? work and income, this chapter marshals a wide array of evidence to show that far from being a post-feminist paradise, women’s overall unequal status compared with men remains a significant feature of the New Zealand socioeconomic landscape, one that will require ongoing redress. This chapter offers an account of the scope and immediate causes of income inequality between women and men. Surveying the gender pay gap enables us to identify deep-seated forms of structural discrimination against women within the labour market. The chapter addresses vertical segregation by gender, which sees women assigned to relatively low-status jobs; horizontal segregation by gender, which acts to concentrate women within a relatively limited array of occupational ‘women’s work’; and the role of unpaid work, particularly childrearing, in creating inequality of opportunity between women and men in the sphere of paid employment and public participation more generally. These forms of discrimination straddle the public and private spheres and are far reaching in their implications and effects, both economically and existentially. So by addressing them we do much more than raise issues for politicians and business leaders to address: awareness needs to extend to all of those involved in shaping community life, who plan and develop its spaces, events, facilities and resources. The forms of discrimination we will address work systematically to marginalise the needs, interests and aspirations of women in general and, in particular, women who are or want to be parents. They suggest our mode of social organisation remains centred on an imagining of the generic and ideal citizen as someone whose ability to participate in public life depends on freedom from domestic responsibilities and commitments. But at present it is really only men—although certainly not all men—who have steady purchase on this kind of personhood. From parking spaces too narrow to allow for safe and easy transfer of a child from seat to stroller, through to our unwillingness to tolerate breastfeeding in public and startling lack of freely available and affordable childcare (Why isn’t there a crèche in every workplace, on every block?), we write into the landscape an abiding attachment to the idea that public participation involves being, or being like, a traditionally-defined man; and Is New Zealand a Post-Feminist Paradise? demonstrate as well a determination to render children and parenthood as inconvenient interruptions to the smooth and proper flow of public life and commerce. Thus the forms of discrimination we address here suggest not only that New Zealand is not post-feminist but is in a certain sense pre-communal: as Mieke Bal observes, “As long as woman is excluded from the community, the community is not really common” (cited in Chow 1998, 55). Becoming postfeminist and, therefore, properly communal will involve, among other things, the creation of a public sphere in which the needs of those who shoulder primary responsibility for childcare—currently, women—are visible, valued and integral: a public sphere that, as it were, expects the expecting. Inequalities at Work Two broadly positive trends frame women’s participation in the labour force in New Zealand today. Firstly, in one of the strongest employment trends of the post-World War II period, women constitute an increasing proportion of the paid workforce. In 2002, women made up 45 per cent of the paid workforce, and a majority of working age women (58 per cent) participated in paid employment, marking a ten percentage point rise in women’s participation rate since 1991. Over the same period, men’s participation rate rose by seven percentage points to 74 per cent (Ministry of Women’s Affairs, 2002: 73). Secondly, the difference between the average earnings of women and men—otherwise known as the gender pay gap—has narrowed. In 1974, the difference between women and men’s average hourly earnings stood at 32.5 per cent, and by 1984 the gap had narrowed to 20.7 per cent. Seventeen years later, in 2001, the gender pay gap had narrowed a further five percentage points to reach 15.7 per cent (Ministry of Women’s Affairs, 2002a: 8). Taken at face value, these broadly positive trends may encourage the view that New Zealand is set upon a track toward achieving gender equality and fairness within the sphere of work. Both trends appear to be heading in the right direction. More women are in paid employment, signalling that barriers to women’s participation in the public sphere have receded somewhat, and the gap between their total average earnings and those of their male counterparts has narrowed. However our closer examination of these trends will reveal a more Is New Zealand a Post-Feminist Paradise? complex picture. The gender pay gap may have narrowed, but why is it still there, and can we expect it to close completely? Women make up almost half of the paid workforce, but what kind of work are they doing, and why is there such a heavy concentration of women within relatively low-paid work? The gender pay gap’s ebbs and flows have been monitored since the Equal Pay Act 1972 was implemented in 1973. Since the Government Services Equal Pay Act 1960, separate male and female pay rates for the same job had been eliminated from state sector employment. The Equal Pay Act extended this to private sector employment. Importantly, as we will discuss at a later stage, the Government Services Equal Pay Act and the Equal Pay Act legislate for equal pay for the same job, leaving untouched the issue of equal pay for work of equal value (also called pay equity). But in removing separate male and female pay rates, the Equal Pay Act made it feasible for women and men eventually to share equally in labour market income—so long as the playing field is level. A recent paper by the Ministry of Women’s Affairs describes the gender pay gap’s “slow and uneven” passage toward greater equality of average earnings between women and men: Between 1972 and 1977, the gender pay gap narrowed by more than six percentage points. In the late 1970s improvement slowed, then stalled under the wage and price freeze of the early 1980s. There was more slow improvement in the late 1980s. The gender pay gap widened slightly in the early 1990s, stabilised, then continued to narrow slowly. As the economy improved in the late 1990s, more improvement was seen in women’s average earnings (Ministry of Women’s Affairs, 2002a: 7). We can see from this description that the narrowing of the pay gap is not inexorable. At certain points it has stabilised and widened, and could do so again. We also can see that the gender pay gap is influenced by broader economic conditions. Accordingly, narrowing of the pay gap does not always signal an increase in average female earnings, but can instead reflect a decrease in average male earnings. This is true of reductions in the gender pay gap among lower-paid workers, all of whom have experienced significant decreases in real wages over the past two decades as a generalised condition of severe Is New Zealand a Post-Feminist Paradise? inequality of market income distribution has asserted itself within the New Zealand economy (Roper, 2005). As the Ministry of Women’s Affairs’ description of the gender pay gap emphasises, the narrowing of the gap has been remarkably slow. It has been 32 years since the Equal Pay Act, and more seriously still it has been 44 years since the Government Services Equal Pay Act. If it is indeed the case that the crucial ingredient for closing the gender pay gap is time, we could reasonably expect this gap to be narrower or to have disappeared in the state sector, given the Government Services Equal Pay Act’s 12 year head start on the Equal Pay Act. Unfortunately this is far from the case. Rather, the gender pay gap in the state sector increased from 16.5 per cent in 1990 to 21 per cent in 2000 (Gordon and Morton, 2001: 3). In May 2002, the gender pay gap in average hourly earnings within the state sector stood at 19.9 per cent, compared with 17.7 per cent within the private sector (Ministry of Women’s Affairs, 2002: 76). Liz Gordon’s survey of state sector pay in 2001 revealed an average gender pay gap of $13,000 per annum (Gordon and Morton, 2001: 10). The pay gap was more pronounced in “small, Wellington-based, policy-oriented Ministries” such as Treasury. In 2001, Treasury’s 134 permanent female staff members received an average annual income of $62,038, just 65 per cent of the $95,327 average for Treasury’s 171 male employees (Gordon and Morton, 2001: 10). Vertical Segregation by Gender As a relatively high-paying employer, Treasury perfectly exemplifies a characteristic feature of the current gender pay gap. It widens the higher up the pay scale you go. As Sylvia Dixon describes, “the gender pay gap is wider—and has been decreasing more slowly—among more highly paid employees than among the lower paid.” (Dixon, 2000: 9) This reflects a labour market pattern of vertical segregation by gender. On the whole, women are underrepresented in highly paid jobs, and when they do work for high-paying employers such as government ministries and universities, they tend to be concentrated in less senior and, therefore, lower paid positions. Is New Zealand a Post-Feminist Paradise? Illustrating this point, Liz Gordon and Missy Morton’s 1999 research into the tertiary sector showed that women occupy only 33 per cent of permanent academic positions and, on average, earn over $10,000 less per annum than their male counterparts (Gordon and Morton, 2001: 9). Complementing Gordon and Morton’s findings, the Human Rights Commission’s 2004 New Zealand Census of Women’s Participation in Governance and Professional Life found that women remain vastly underrepresented in senior academic positions right across the tertiary sector. Adding together all the Professors and Associate Professors in New Zealand’s eight universities, the Commission found that only 15 per cent of them are women (Human Rights Commission, 2004: 11). A similar situation exists within the legal arena. Although women form a majority of law graduates and those annually admitted to the New Zealand Law society, they make up only 37 per cent of employed barristers and solicitors and hold 14 per cent of legal partnerships within firms of ten or more partners (Human Rights Commission, 2004: 8, 11). This pattern of vertical segregation by gender goes some way toward explaining the gender pay gap. So long as a significantly lesser number of women than men occupy senior and highly paid positions, the average earnings of women as a group are likely to lag behind those of men. Again, it may be argued that only time and women’s continued efforts are needed to redress this pattern of vertical segregation and its attendant inequalities. The more women catch the ‘knowledge wave’ and accumulate the requisite education and training, the greater the degree of income equality they can expect. However women have been catching this particular wave in increasing numbers over the past three decades, without being able to match men’s rate of return for investment in education. Between 1970 and 1990 the number of women university graduates rose from over 30 per cent to nearly 50 per cent. During the 1990s, initiating a trend that continues to this day, women went on to form a majority of graduates, their number reaching 55 per cent by 1998 (Gordon and Morton, 2001: 5). The figures on tertiary participation rates for 2003 show 12 per cent of women over 15 undertaking tertiary education compared with 9 per cent of men over 15 Is New Zealand a Post-Feminist Paradise? (Ministry of Social Development, 2004: 47). According to Jacqueline Rowarth’s analysis of the 1998 Graduate Destinations Survey, women students also garner a higher proportion of A-grades than do their male counterparts (Rowarth, 1999: 2). Despite their efforts, however, women can still expect to earn less than their equally qualified male counterparts. The New Zealand University Students’ Association has found that “women with a degree earn only 83 per cent of equally qualified men’s hourly earnings, while women with no qualifications earn 86 per cent of the hourly earnings of men with no qualifications” (The New Zealand University Students’ Association, 2002: 3). Between 1991 and 1996, while the rate of return for investment in education remained stable for male graduates, the rate of return for female graduates declined by 7 per cent (The New Zealand University Students’ Association, 2002: 3). Importantly, these discrepancies can not be attributed to women’s decisions regarding pregnancy and parenthood: “The New Zealand Vice Chancellor’s survey showed that, five years after graduation, the gender pay gap is around $10,000 a year. Most of these women graduates are young, so the differential is being created before career breaks for childbearing” (Ministry of Women’s Affairs, 2002a: 9). Within this context, the student loan scheme acts like regressive taxation (Roper, 2005). Women and men undertaking identical education and training initially owe identical sums, but because women have a lower average rate of return in terms of after-graduation income, they take longer to repay their loans and, therefore, face greater total interest repayments. On average, women carry the burden of student debt for almost twice as long as men do. According to the New Zealand University Students’ Association’s calculations, “the average male bachelors graduate will take 15 years to repay his loan while the average female bachelors graduate will take 28 years to repay her loan” (The New Zealand University Students’ Association, 2002: 4). Their calculations also show that loan repayment periods vary according to ethnicity. On average, Maori and Pakeha women repay bachelors degrees over 24 and 22 years respectively, while for Pacific women this figure stands at 33 years. Given this, the greatest average discrepancy in loan repayment periods within the total graduate population is between Pacific women and Pakeha men: Is New Zealand a Post-Feminist Paradise? The differences in these repayment times amount to a big difference in what men and women pay for their tertiary qualifications. For example, compare the cases of the average Pakeha male and the average Pacific female bachelors graduates. The Pakeha male will borrow $21,786 and on his debt will pay $12,534 in interest or 58% of his initial borrowing. The Pacific female will borrow $22,961 and will pay $25,413 interest or 111% of her initial borrowing. She has paid $12,878 more for the same qualification as her male classmate (The New Zealand University Students’ Association, 2002: 5). The form of unfairness created here is dangerously circular and selfperpetuating. Because women can expect a lower average income return on their investment in education, they also can expect to pay more for their education, which in turn erodes their after-graduation earnings even further. This arrangement is a great source of hardship. With the loan scheme’s repayment threshold set at $15,000 per annum, after which repayments constitute 10 per cent of the debtor’s income, women whose incomes will never rise much above this, or will only do so slowly, are the worst affected. Is New Zealand a Post-Feminist Paradise? Horizontal Segregation by Gender It would seem, then, that it is not for want of educated women that the New Zealand labour market exhibits a pattern of vertical segregation by gender and, therefore, a gender pay gap that widens the higher up the pay scale you go. But this pattern of vertical segregation is only part of the story of the gender pay gap, for it operates in tandem with another pronounced labour market pattern, that of horizontal segregation by gender, also called occupational segregation. These terms describe the tendency for women and men to be concentrated in different kinds of occupations. In New Zealand, as in much of the rest of the world, a majority of women in the labour force work within female-dominated occupations, and a majority of men work within male-dominated occupations. New Zealanders may have fully digested the concept of a female prime minister, but a great many occupations remain strongly sex-typed according to traditional conceptions of appropriate ‘women’s work’ and ‘men’s work.’ As Anne Else and Barbara Bishop note, this form of segregation “has different implications for women and men” (Else and Bishop, 2003: 1). To begin with, horizontal segregation has a negative impact upon equality of employment opportunity (or employment equity). A greater number and variety of occupations are seen as appropriate to men and, accordingly, are maledominated. In their analysis of the 2001 census data, Else and Bishop found that of the nine major occupational groups, three host a slightly higher percentage of women (between 52 and 65 per cent) and only one, clerks, can be classed as female-dominated (78 per cent) (Else and Bishop, 2003: 5). In effect, men’s employment opportunities are greater in scope, with men “spread much more evenly across the nine major occupational groups, and across a wider range of occupations, than women” (Else and Bishop, 2003: 7). 50 per cent of employed men work in 39 occupations, while 50 per cent of employed women work in 22 occupations (Else and Bishop, 2003: 6-7). Horizontal segregation also raises the issue of pay equity. This form of segregation is said to account for between 20 and 40 per cent of the gender pay gap in average hourly earnings (Dixon, 2000: 87). This is because horizontal segregation hosts a dynamic whereby “the typing of jobs as male serves to Is New Zealand a Post-Feminist Paradise? elevate status and pay [while] the typing of jobs as female does the reverse” (Ministry of Women’s Affairs, 2002a: 18). Female-dominated occupations typically attract lesser rates of pay than do male-dominated occupations, even when the occupations concerned clearly are directly comparable in terms of their character, conditions and productive value. Different pay rates between directly comparable occupations create pay inequity—unequal pay for work of equal value. As noted earlier, in 1972 the Equal Pay Act left the issue of pay equity unanswered, legislating only for equal pay for the same job. Measures to ensure pay equity in the public service, public health and education sectors are likely to be introduced in the near future following the Clark government’s establishment of the Taskforce on Pay and Employment Equity in 2003. The Taskforce aims to eliminate pay inequity in these areas by 2008. A glance at the pay differential between nurses and police will provide a clear example of pay inequity, as well as demonstrate why the Taskforce has the health sector in its sights.1 Nursing and policing are directly comparable occupations in terms of hours, degree of on-the-job responsibility and stress, and risks to health and safety. Both occupations require training, and both perform a key social service. Despite the overwhelming set of similarities between them, they are remunerated very differently. After completing their tuition fee-free six-month training in Porirua, police officers climb from a training rate of $13 per hour to a starting salary of $46,125 per annum ($22 per hour). In comparison, becoming a registered nurse involves undertaking a three-year bachelors degree, with average fees of $3500 per annum on top of living costs (no pay while training). These expenses are most likely to be met through the student loan scheme, which sets the maximum borrowing for nurses at $30,300. The starting salary for nurses is between $29,000 and $30,000 per annum. According to the New Zealand University Students’ Association’s calculations, those who borrow the maximum can expect to repay their loans over a 30 year period, during which time $29,909 of loan interest will form part of the total repayment of $60,209 for the original degree (The New Zealand University Students’ Association, 2002: 1 Since this chapter was written the union for nurses working in the public sector, under the leadership of Laila Harre, thankfully has won a substantial pay rise. However nurses working in the private sector remain underpaid. Is New Zealand a Post-Feminist Paradise? 6). Even as their work evidently is as demanding and valuable as that of police, nurses not only pay dearly for their training but also can expect to be paid significantly less than police despite this training. This example of pay inequity begs the question as to why a skilled profession like nursing is significantly under-remunerated. Is it simply an oversight, or does it have something to do with the fact that 94 per cent of nurses are women? Horizontal segregation both draws upon and reinforces a particular ideology of gender, one in which the skills, capacities and roles of women and men are perceived as fundamentally different in character—and, it seems, exchange value. Women’s traditional role within the family follows them into the workforce, shaping expectations of their workplace performance and propelling them into forms of paid employment that closely resemble this traditional role. As Else and Bishop note, this trend is especially evident within service-oriented industries: Much of women’s increased labour participation has been in expanding service industries involving commercialised aspects of women’s traditional role and unpaid work in the home, such as serving food or caring for children or the elderly (Else and Bishop, 2003: 17). As a category, ‘men’s work’ is broad and diverse, while ‘women’s work’ contains a comparatively limited range of occupations that tend to involve caring for others, serving others and/or assuming a position of comparatively lower status. These traits are clearly present in the ten most common occupations of women, most notably secretary, registered nurse, care giver, cleaner, general clerk and receptionist (Else and Bishop, 2003: 6). Homecare workers, the vast majority of whom are women, provide a startling example of how traditional ‘women’s work’ is undervalued. Unlike many service providers, their clients—the elderly, people awaiting or recovering from surgery, and people with long-term conditions such as paraplegia—are absolutely dependent upon their provision of care. In return for undertaking this important responsibility, they earn between $8.40 and $10.77 per hour (Ministry of Women’s Affairs, 2002a: 36). In all likelihood, the only female-dominated Is New Zealand a Post-Feminist Paradise? occupation interlinked with stereotypical understandings of women that tends not to be underpaid is the newly decriminalised category of sex work. ‘Women’s work’ attracts less pay than ‘men’s work’ because outside the sphere of paid work it is performed for free, not recognised as ‘real work,’ and thought to involve not wrought skill but natural capacity. Women in occupations that involve skills widely regarded as natural female capacities, such as nurturing, caring, domesticity and able communication, face greater difficulty than do their male counterparts in having the skills they bring to the workplace recognised as skills. As the Ministry of Women’s Affairs background paper on pay equity explains: The skills required in interacting well with people (managers, staff or clients) and in other kinds of emotional labour often go unnoticed. Tact and subtlety in raising and resolving issues with people may not be recognised as problem solving skills. Services based on these skills may be provided free at home, and therefore undervalued at work . . . Complex interpersonal skills, heavy physical effort and responsibility for life and death are requirements of many jobs caring for children, the sick and the elderly. These components are likely to be undervalued in women’s pay packets (Ministry of Women’s Affairs, 2002a: 18). This suggests that when you next hear someone complain about a nurse’s lack of bedside manner, a secretary’s bad attitude, or a receptionist’s brusqueness, you will in fact be witnessing part of a generalised expectation that women perform emotional labour in their workplaces without adequate, or without any, recognition or remuneration for so doing.2 Apart from allowing wrought skill to be mistaken for natural capacity, horizontal segregation also tends to disguise commonalities between ‘women’s ‘Emotional labour,’ as distinct from physical labour, is a characteristic feature of serviceoriented occupations where face-to-face interaction with customers, clients or patients plays a key role. It also forms a component in jobs like secretarial work and court work. Originally defined by Arlie Hochschild in her classic study of airline hostesses and debt collectors, the term describes work that centrally involves the management of feeling to sustain an outward countenance that produces the desired state of mind in others. Jobs involving emotional labour tend to be strongly sex-typed, and those performed predominantly by women tend to be underremunerated owing to their ostensibly ‘de-skilled’ nature (Hochschild, 1983). Hochschild’s most recent work looks at emotional labour in connection with global patterns of female labour migration (Ehrenreich and Hochschild, 2004). 2 Is New Zealand a Post-Feminist Paradise? work’ and ‘men’s work’. A good example of this is provided by Alison Robins’ research into gender segregation in Wellington supermarkets (Robins, 2001). While produce sections are cast as men-only domains because they require heavy lifting, women undertaking apparently ‘easier work’ in delicatessen sections were observed to handle equally heavy loads, including large crates and full cheeses. Mysteriously, physical strength is stereotypically unfeminine. But one need only weigh children between the ages of zero and five, or consider what it takes to move a physically dependent adult from bath to bed, to gauge many women’s starkly unstereotypical capacity to handle heavy loads. Is New Zealand a Post-Feminist Paradise? Unpaid Work: It’s good to be a guy We have seen that the labour market is vertically and horizontally segregated by gender in such a way that women as a group garner lesser average earnings than men. But no account of this arrangement is complete without addressing the productive labour women perform in the absence of any financial return whatsoever, for inequalities in the sphere of paid work link directly with inequalities in the sphere of unpaid work. According to the results of New Zealand’s first time-use survey, conducted by Statistics New Zealand in 1998/1999, both women and men undertake a considerable amount of unpaid productive labour. But on average women do significantly more unpaid work than men, and the unpaid labours of women and men tend to be divided in such a way that they impact differently upon their respective abilities to participate in paid work. Categories of unpaid work include housework, caring for household members young and old, purchasing household goods and services, and formalised or informal voluntary work in the community. This work is of productive value because, from the ironing of work shirts to the rearing of children, it serves to maintain and reproduce the labour force, and encompasses services that otherwise would have to be bought in or provided by government.3 The time-use survey found that time spent on unpaid work, approximately 4.2 billion hours per year, is greater than time spent on paid work (3.5 billion hours) (Statistics New Zealand, 2001: 12). Put another way, “the time spent on unpaid work as a primary activity in one year equates to 2 million full-time jobs, whereas the time spent on paid work equates to 1.7 million full-time jobs” (Ministry of Women’s Affairs, 2002b: 29). The value of unpaid work to the New Zealand economy is reckoned at $40 billion (equivalent to 39 per cent of annual GDP) with women’s efforts accounting for 65 per cent of this, or $25 billion (Statistics New Zealand, 2001: 12). In view of these figures, if the value of unpaid work were to be recognised and remunerated—that is, if it were to be ‘contracted out’ as are other services in accord with the reigning principles of free market enterprise—the average household worker would garner a base annual income of $13,820 (Ministry of Social Development, 2004: 63). Statistics New Zealand (2001: 12) provide this definition of unpaid work: “An activity is classed as unpaid work if it is a productive activity that has no remuneration and satisfies the third person criterion—that is, the activity yields an output that can be exchanged.” 3 Is New Zealand a Post-Feminist Paradise? According to the time-use survey women and men both spend approximately 49 hours working each week, on average 7 hours per day. But 60 per cent of the work men do is paid, while 70 per cent of the work women do is unpaid (Statistics New Zealand, 2001: 10). On average, across all the categories of unpaid work listed above, “women do more unpaid work than men, regardless of whether they are parents or not” (Statistics New Zealand, 2001: 10). In terms of average hours spent on housework each day, women spent a little over 2 hours on cleaning, doing the laundry, and preparing meals. By comparison, men spent less than 45 minutes on these tasks. Reflecting a classic gendered division of labour, men’s efforts were concentrated marginally more than women’s on grounds and pet maintenance, and considerably more on home maintenance (almost 20 minutes per day to women’s 5 minutes) (Statistics New Zealand, 2001: 10). But the greatest discrepancy was between the time women and men spent on caregiving for household members, primarily children, with women doing over twice as much of this work as men: Around 95 per cent of caregiving time involves caring for children, with the majority of this being for children of pre-school age . . . Responsibility for this task falls largely to women, with those aged 25 to 34 spending 1.9 hours a day on caregiving compared with men’s 0.6 hours. Women aged 35 to 44 averaged 1.6 hours a day on caregiving compared with men’s 0.9 hours (Statistics New Zealand, 2001: 11). This is a key finding, for it demonstrates that parenthood has very different implications for women and men. The years between the ages of 25 and 44 are prime for income earning and career advancement. On the whole, for men as a group, these years retain this character whether or not they become parents. But for women as a group, becoming a parent means a sharp rise in unpaid work as well as wage penalties and career interruption in the domain of paid work. The time-use survey found that mothers spent on average 2.6 hours a day more than fathers on unpaid work, and 2.0 hours more than women without children Is New Zealand a Post-Feminist Paradise? (Statistics New Zealand, 2001: 10). These figures hardly differ between partnered and solo mothers for whom unpaid work is a primary activity. Solo mothers spent marginally less time on unpaid work in their own households than did partnered mothers, 5.5 hours per day compared with just under 6 hours, suggesting that father presence adds to rather than alleviates partnered mother’s unpaid workload (Statistics New Zealand, 2001a: 37). In terms of wage penalties and career interruption, dependent children are said to account for 10 per cent of the gender pay gap in general, and up to one-third of the average earnings gap between men and women in the 20-39 year age bracket, with solo mothers facing a child-wage penalty approximately 1.5 times larger than that of partnered mothers (Dixon, 2000: 8). In short, female parents face wage penalties that male parents do not, without any corresponding reduction in the time they spend engaged in productive labour. As the current Hallensteins advertising campaign asserts, it is indeed good to be a guy. Unlike with other forms of unfairness within the sphere of work, women parents can not exactly down their tools in protest, leaving children unfed while dirty dishes and laundry pile up—although something akin to the downing of tools is occurring as women increasingly delay parenthood so as to defer wage and career progress penalties. But among women who do have children, the possibility of avoiding these penalties is only securely available to an affluent, partnered minority. Women parenting alone face greater barriers to participation in paid employment than do partnered women, and whether or not they are partnered, women in low- to middle-income households looking to continue or undertake paid employment often find their earnings will be eclipsed, nearly or totally, by the cost of replacement childcare. Demonstrating that quality affordable childcare is not available to all, the 1998 New Zealand Childcare Survey found that “of those mothers who reported not participating in paid employment because of lack of childcare, almost half gave cost as the reason” (Ministry of Women’s Affairs, 2002b: 29). Access to quality affordable childcare is absolutely vital, but is not by itself a cure-all. In the week during which the childcare survey was conducted, the childcare arrangements of 1 in 10 families were disrupted in some way, in most Is New Zealand a Post-Feminist Paradise? cases due to child illness. Childcare centres understandably exclude children while they are unwell, usually for at least 24 hours, and in these circumstances employers and workplaces need to be appropriately supportive and accommodating. The survey results also suggest that the burdens posed by such disruption are not equitably shared between parents: “Mothers were much more likely (45 per cent) than fathers (28 per cent) to have their employment affected by this disruption” (Ministry of Women’s Affairs, 2002b: 29). Many women undertake part-time work (30 hours or less per week) in order to juggle their unpaid workload with participation in paid employment. Accordingly, part-time work is overwhelmingly feminised: in 2001 women made up 72 per cent of all part-time workers (Ministry of Women’s Affairs, 2002b: 30). However part-time work can pose as many problems as it does solutions, for most often it is casual work characterised by insecurity of tenure, minimum conditions and, “disproportionately as the Ministry concentrated in of Women’s the Affairs reports, female-dominated service it is and community sectors, at low rates of pay” (Ministry of Women’s Affairs, 2002a: 30). Rates of pay for all part-time workers are relatively low, and the gender pay gap between women and men in part-time work is narrower than for those in full-time work. In 2001 the average hourly rates for men and women in full-time work—$18.18 and $15.66 respectively—exceeded those for men and women in part-time work, who earned on average $14.88 and $13.74 per hour respectively (Ministry of Women’s Affairs, 2002a: 6). Thus it comes as no surprise that many women find part-time employment does not enable them to make ends meet. Between 1987 and 1997, the proportion of women working part-time who reported a desire to work more hours increased from 1 in 10 to 1 in 4 (Statistics New Zealand, 1998: 90). As Statistics New Zealand describes, “Over the same period, the proportion of women part-time workers looking for full-time work increased three-fold” (Statistics New Zealand, 1998: 90). Certainly this trend has not abated since 1997. In June 2002, 65.2 per cent of all part-time workers wanting more hours were women (Ministry of Women’s Affairs, 2002: 75). The other remedy women use is to work in two or more jobs concurrently. Accordingly, in 2001 it was found that women make up 59 per cent of those working in multiple jobs (Ministry of Women’s Affairs, 2002b: 30). Is New Zealand a Post-Feminist Paradise? As noted earlier, the challenges women face in combining parenthood and paid employment are more acute if they are parenting independently than if they are partnered, especially if their youngest child is under five years of age. This is reflected in the fact that a very high proportion of New Zealand’s population of solo mothers are on low incomes. There are approximately 148,000 solo mothers in New Zealand: they make up 10 per cent of the adult female population. Over 50 per cent of all mothers in paid employment with a youngest child under five have personal incomes of less than $20,001 per annum (Ministry of Women’s Affairs, 2002c: 6). But when we look at total household income, only 4 per cent of partnered mothers have a combined annual household income of less than $20,001, while for solo mothers this figure remains at 58 per cent (Ministry of Women’s Affairs, 2002c: 6-7). Similarly, over 70 per cent of all mothers not in paid employment who have a youngest child under five have personal incomes less than $20,001. But in this category 10 per cent of partnered mothers, and 70 per cent of solo mothers, have a total household income below $20,001 (Ministry of Women’s Affairs, 2002c: 6-7). It is clear from these figures that our society is still configured in such a way that women parenting independently, whether by choice or force of circumstance, face severe financial penalty. This form of structural discrimination operates not just economically but also attitudinally, as is made clear by the social stigmatisation of women who act on their entitlement to the Domestic Purposes Benefit (DPB). Since its introduction in 1972, the DPB has played the crucial role of facilitating financial independence for solo parents, mostly women, who are primarily engaged in the productive labour of raising dependent children. The DPB enables women to exit violent or otherwise unhappy relationships without losing the means of subsistence, it provides a security net in unforeseen circumstances such as abandonment, illness or redundancy, and it offers albeit meagre compensation for the fact that the labour market, as it is currently configured, is inhospitable to solo parents. Currently, the DPB plays these roles for 6.7 per cent of the total female population. However these factors rarely are visible within public debate on the DPB. Is New Zealand a Post-Feminist Paradise? Rather than grant room for celebrating the courageous choice to leave a violent partner, end an unhappy relationship, and undertake the extraordinary challenge of parenting independently, salient public pronouncements on the DPB focus instead on ‘welfare dependency’ and, armed with this spurious concept, cast aspersions on the work ethic of DPB recipients and their children. The National Party, the most salient purveyor of these views, asks that we conceive of the DPB as “a sentence to lifetime dependency” and join them in picturing the children of DPB recipients as “the biggest losers on welfare” (Rich, 2004: 4-5). This inflated rhetoric contrasts sharply with the evidence-based findings of the Ministry of Social Development’s 2001 survey of the DPB population. The survey found no significant difference between the job search behaviour of DPB recipients and that of the general population (Ministry of Social Development, 2001: 28). The key goal of the recipients surveyed was suitable employment. That is, paid employment lucrative enough to make ends meet and flexible enough to facilitate workable childcare arrangements.4 This goal is perfectly reasonable, responsible and self-respecting. As should be clear from our discussion, it actually is not a question of how DPB recipients should change in order to enter the labour market. It is rather a question of whether the labour market will in future become a properly equitable sphere capable of accommodating the needs and aspirations of women who have children. Conclusion The Ministry of Social Development recently reported that the number of people who consider that women are subject to some or a great deal of discrimination has declined from 50 to 38 per cent between 2000 and 2004 (Ministry of Social Development 2004: 80). A significant number of New Zealanders, then, would agree with my American colleague that New Zealand is indeed a post-feminist paradise. No doubt the public visibility of New Zealand’s most successful women—Prime Minister Helen Clark, Attorney General Margaret Wilson, Chief Justice Sian Elias, Governor General Dame Sylvia Cartwright—feeds this As MSD (2001: 20) explains: “The evaluation found that the DPB population had a high previous work history and was generally highly work motivated once they considered that their family circumstances, including childcare arrangements, allowed them to meet the demands of employment.” 4 Is New Zealand a Post-Feminist Paradise? perception, acting as it does to disguise the socio-economically unequal status of a majority of women. But there is another reason why this perception of New Zealand has such purchase. As this chapter has sought to demonstrate, key inequalities currently at work have as their source forms of structural, as distinct from direct, discrimination. Forms of structural discrimination like vertical and horizontal segregation and the wage and career progress penalties attending the unpaid productive labour of parenthood, are much more difficult to perceive and problematise than are forms of direct discrimination such as overtly sexist attitudes, firing women upon marriage, or offering women and men different rates of pay for the same job. Put euphemistically, direct discrimination is the bull in the china shop, while structural discrimination is the snake in the grass. Unfortunately, at the same time as they free-ride $25 billion worth of unpaid female labour annually, our business leaders exploit structural discrimination’s cloak of naturalness and normality. Consider this statement from Business New Zealand: “it would be a mistake to assume that a zero [gender pay] gap is inevitable, as many women will continue to have breaks from the paid workforce to have children, and the job market naturally pays a premium for continuity” (Business New Zealand, 2003: 1). Rather than blame women’s choices for the inequalities that remain, it is time we recognise and redress the fact that, as Barbara Sullivan (1990: 187) puts it, “the organisation of work in our society appears unable to accommodate one of the most common life experiences of adult females.” Is New Zealand a Post-Feminist Paradise? Bibliography Business New Zealand (2 October 2003) Media Release: Gender Pay Gap Shrinking. Wellington: Business New Zealand. Chow, Rey. (1998) Ethics After Idealism: Theory-culture-ethnicity-reading. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Dixon, S. (2000) Pay Inequality Between Men and Women in New Zealand. 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