The Gender Pay Gap debate in NZ has always felt like a lot of white tertiary educated women at Boardroom level management pissed off they aren’t getting the same sweet deals the boys are getting.
Less Les Misérables and more Laissez-faire miserable.
Surely the harvest of civil society should be a wee bit broader than the Professional Female Management Class?
At the centre of the Gender Pay Gap is the biological reality women carry the babies. If we as a liberal progressive society want to ensure everyone has equal agency, then surely recognising biological reality is a starting point?
The first 12months should be maternity leave – or paternity leave, either one, but one of the parents should be paid to stay home with the infant for its first year of life. Who else do you want to look after an infant other than the parent?
Meanwhile, ECE should be nationalised and made completely free for 2 year olds to 5 year olds while all after school care should be free.
Childcare costs fall unevenly and unfairly on women, so why not eliminate those costs altogether?
Playing the Gender Pay Gap Game even when implemented, doesn’t lead to the outcomes desired.
If women having babies is stunting their pay careers, then subside the cost of having that kid with 12months maternity/paternity leave, Nationalise ECE and free after school care.
Also implement a 4 day working week for all state employees so that people’s quality of life is lifted rather than just wage growth.
The promise of Democracy is you can look in your kids face and know they will have a netter deal of it than you.
Allowing a parent to stay home with their kid for a year, provide free early education care and free after school care would do more to live up to that promise than anything else.
We need to start fight9ing for tomorrow because none of the politicians are.
All we need to do to fund this type of universal upgrade of the social infrastructure is tax the rich!
Nationals 3 biggest donors (Hart, Mowbray and Bolton) have a combined net worth of 15 billion!
The Bottom 50% of NZ has 23 billion.
The top 5% of NZers own roughly 50% of NZs wealth, while the bottom 50% of NZers own a miserable 5%!
IRD proved NZ Capitalism is rigged for the rich and Bernard Hickey calculates that if we had a basic capital gains tax in place over the last decade, we would have earned $200billion in tax revenue.
$200billion would have ensured our public infrastructure wouldn’t be in such an underfunded ruin right now!
There are 14 Billionaires in NZ + 3118 ultra-high net worth individuals with over $50million each, why not start start with them, then move onto the Banks, then the Property Speculators, the Climate Change polluters and big industry to pay their fair share before making workers pay more tax!
Culture War fights make all the noise, but poor people aren’t sitting around the kitchen table cancelling people for misusing pronouns, they are trying to work out how to pay the bills!
Bread and Butter cost of living pressures are what the electorate want answers to, and that’s where the Left need to step up and push universal policy that lifts that cost from the people.
The Commerce Commission is clear that the Supermarket Duopoly should be broken up and the State should step in and provide that competition.
We need year long maternity leave.
We need a nationalised Early Education Sector that provides free childcare for children under 5.
We need free public transport.
We need free breakfast and lunches in schools.
We need free dental.
We need 50 000 new State Houses.
We need more hospitals, more schools and a Teachers aid in every class room.
We need climate change adaptation and a resilient rebuilt infrastructure.
We need all these things and we need to fund them by taxing the rich who the IRD clearly showed were rigging the system.
That requires political courage and there is none!
No one is willing to fight for tomorrow, they merely want to pacify the present!
Just promise me one thing.
Don’t. You. Dare. Vote. Early. In. 2023!
I can not urge this enough from you all comrades.
Don’t vote early in the 2023 election.
I’m not going to tell you who to vote for because this is a liberal progressive democracy and your right to chose who you want in the secrecy of that ballot box is a scared privilege and is your god damned right as a citizen.
But what I will beg of you, is to not vote early in 2023.
Comrades, on our horizon is inflation in double figures, geopolitical shockwave after geopolitical shockwave and a global economic depression.
As a nation we will face some of the toughest choices and decision making outside of war time and that means you must press those bloody MPs to respond to real policy solutions and make those buggers promise to change things and you can’t do that if you hand your vote over before the bloody election!
Keep demanding concessions and promises for your vote right up until midnight before election day AND THEN cast your vote!
We only get 1 chance every 3 years to hold these politicians feet to the fire and they only care before the election, so force real concessions out of them before you elect them.
This election is going to be too important to just let politicians waltz into Parliament without being blistered by our scrutiny.
Demand real concessions from them and THEN vote on Election Day.
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Is this only for the underclasses. We’re going to fix wealth distribution aren’t we? Make New Zealand strong. Pull in the same direction upwards, and produce more millionaires. Fixed it.
I reckon woman at 89%
You’re going to need high economic growth to pay for your new social schemes. The Malthusian nonsense of ‘degrowth’ is not progressive at all (and certainly not socialist).
The high wage ladies’ jobs you’re calling for also need growth. Manufacturing of clothing, footwear, other textiles, electronics and foodstuffs will all need to come back home — and the factories will have to be rebuilt.
The Award System and universal union membership would also need to be restored, so workers can actually bargain for such higher wages.
Why do you argue that “degrowth” is not socialist?
It is promoted by socialists…..
@Johan: Since the mid-19th century, socialists believed that the next economic mode of production superceding capitalism would emerge as the productive forces continued to develop through growth: the trend towards more extensive, more centralised production — and the gradual eradication of both the scarcity of goods and crises of overproduction, as the adoption of industrial planning began.
The Club of Rome revived Malthusianism in the 1970s, which was soon dubbed ‘degrowth’ — a pro-capitalist, globalist project. A small number of revisionists, opposed by most socialists, attempted to repackage it as a revival of left-utopian anti-industrialism.
My point exactly. Why are the new socialists and progressives promoting degrowth?
I have been “demonetised” on other platforms for using the name of that economic theory. Thanks TDB, for being open minded.
I reckon women at 89% of men’s income is the gender pay gap closed. As soon as there are more woman capable of doing and wanting to do more dangerous jobs like oil riggers, pylon painters, fireperson, cranedriver etc and start running there own businesses and get better at negotiating their wage rates the gender pay gap will be zero. The other thing that could be done is to encourage more men to go into low paying jobs…
Hey Joseph I challenge you to do the same heavy industrial work that I (with my lady body) have done, you make wild assumptions that women are not making swift progress and doing these roles already.
Women want equal numbers of CEOs, not engineers, technologists and certainly not plumbers, builders or garbage men.
The gender pay gap is the most dishonest bollocks next to critical race theory and the modern multi-gender madness.
Are they prepared to work 70-80 weeks, forgo children and die at a younger age?
It’s not a gender pay gap. It’s the PRIMARY CAREGIVER pay gap.
Being the primary caregiver is a permanent brake on earnings when they return to the workforce.
These statements below are based on averages before someone pops up to write an anecdote about someone they knew once.
Childless women have higher salaries than mothers.
Lesbians have higher salaries than other women (am I still allowed to say that?)
Men who stay home to be the caregiver have lower salaries for the rest of their working life.
It seems logical and sounds about right.
It will be interesting to see the data.
Why do lesbians have higher salaries than other women? Would that be because other woman are mother’s? Hold on lesbians are mother’s too. May be lesbians just do those higher paying more dangerous jobs that are mostly done by guys or lesbians are more aggressive in their wage negotions. Your stat shows gender pay gap is a nonsense.
Can lesbians sleep their way to the top?
asking for a friend
What is a woman?
It is both. And it will get worse in the future. Why hire a menstruating, birthing, lactating, human female when you can hire a trans identified male and meet your ‘woman’ quota thusly?
Good point!
“We need…”
Haven’t you realized yet, Labour’s delivering nothing.
Or have they delivered need abundantly?
That & chaos.
I would argue three years maternity leave for one parent.
The 20 hours free for daycare for 2 year olds is a seriously flawed approach.
Kids should be in the care of caring parents up to the age at three.
Where parents can demonstrate that the kids will be better off at daycare government can step in a help by paying for daycare.
Yes, absolutely – because other peoples’ money is completely free and they don’t really need it at all (sarcasm)
No.
Because it makes economic sense and has social benefits that we so desperately need.
(No sarcasm)
The “gender” pay gap is easily closed. Just hire enough males identifying as females and pay them as you would the males. 🙂 A parliament/board/office with 50% males identifying as men and 50% males identifying as women is ‘equitable’ outcome for the genders, the sexes – male vs female – needn’t apply as that gap will never fully be closed , as we are still very far – if not the furthest away in a long time – of ‘pay equality’ and for that matter job equality.
As for inflation, and all that jazz, well it has nothing to do with ‘gender’ and will not be resolved in a long time. After all the government is quite happy about its increased ‘GST’ tax take and the increase in income tax paid by people on low income thanks to hefty pay increases on the min wage, everytime a price goes up so does their tax income. Sadly no government can ‘min wage ‘ increase itself out of a running away costs, a collapsing social society, and businesses that end up closing because either they get robbed to often or their last customer just spend their last penny, that would need different methods, and sadly we don’t hire people for their abilities but for their perceived ‘gender’, their perceived ‘diversity’, their perceived ‘likablity’ and in the end even the slowest will at some stage understand that neither Chippy nor Key will want to have a beer with you.
“Gender “s is your stereotypical application of what we think women and men are/behave, sex is the biological reality of our bodies and nothing will ever change that biological reality, even if on castrates oneself or undergoes a sex nullification operation/phalloplasty. And those that birth – be they female identifying as women or females identifying as non binary or females identifying as males – will generally be considered lesser in the workplace due to their birthing abilities and all the bodily functions that come with that ability.
If men were the ones to give birth from tomorrow onwards abortion would not be a sacrament, but men would be oppressed on the grounds of them being birthers.
But i guess in a world were no one will own a thing, were nationalities are considered ‘white/ light skinned supremacy or something akin to that ‘ were everything is too expensive for most, were homelessness and getting food from soup kitchens is considered acceptable by polite society ‘gender’ is the last and only thing one has left to identify with / as. But in the end Gender is the made up stereotype and sex is what one is. Guess who will be hit hardest by the future unemployment – female women/nb/men, guess who will receive the least amount of unemployment money – female women/nb/men with partners, guess who will be among the poorest in any country – female women/nb/men, just as it was when we just called them women without including males in that category.
A lot to think about there RB,
I’d certainly like more.
Serious question: what’s stopping you?
The Patriarchy!
Prove it
Helen comments on The Daily Blog, owned and operated by a male, Bomber. And then turns around and says patriarchy is stopping her from gaining an even larger share of the wealth.
Bomber hasn’t oppressed Helen at all. Niether has anyone else.
Judging by Helens answer her ultimate goal isn’t a greater share of wealth and status for the continuation of the genetic bloodlines it’s to eliminate masculinity and gender roles making everyone androgynous which is closer to the Aryan race theory.
It’s idiotic and I’ve had it upto here*** with all this 2+2ing=5.
Pretty soon everyone is going to treat feminist the same as transactivists.
Martyn I wish you’d posted this article earlier. Just last week I hired a guy for a new role, and now I find out if I’d hired a woman instead I could have got away with paying her 11% less. Do you think I’m made of money?
Remind me: 1 how they decided who was in which basket. Ie what is a woman
2 how they adjusted for men who took primary caregiver roles. And so by definition are not primarily focused on their jobs. Ie the methodology is corrupt while we have people who care about kith and kin
Yes Ada house husband s are part of gender pay gap.
What about men? They can have babies too. Why focus only on women? It sounds rather bigoted.
How about, just don’t have children.
And then there’s surely the un vaccinated pay gap too. You know, the ones who you were happy to see forced out of work.
Oh dear? A bit of an own goal here. How many Labour governments have let this pass by? 6?
Question.
Are there different rates for the alphabet peeps except for the ‘t’s? They haven’t figured out what they are, yet.
It’s getting boring now. Midwives earn more than midhusbands. Female sex workers earn more than male sex workers. Female Prime Minister earn the same as Male prime ministers. Minimum wage baristas all earn the same minimum wage. And so on…horses for courses except pro tennis: females get 1 million for 45 minutes and 2 set finals, males have to play for 4 hours and 5 sets – now is that fair???!!!!
Ada has it right!
There is no gender pay gap, unless you somehow think that all jobs should pay the exact same amount. Indeed, it is illegal to pay someone less in New Zealand when they are doing the same job. Has been that way for a very long time. What this boils down to is that you think women dominated jobs (e.g. cleaners, caregivers, waiting tables, etc) should get paid the same as male dominated jobs (building, welding, mechanics, forestry). Since we are not a Communist country, the market decides these things. Do the same work, get the same pay. It’s that simple.
Fair point Nitrium
For the first thousand days, a child needs their parents. The more we can provide for this to happen, the less problems we will encounter later in said child’s life. Government policy needs to be based on science and health, and making ECE free for under 2s will only expand the outsourcing of child-raising and create a further generation of disconnected teenagers, abandoned shortly after birth, because daycares were considered good for working parents. No two parents should be working if we want to create a future society that does not suffer the ills of today’s. And father’s need to be considered an important parent too, history shows that most evil evolves from deadbeat daddying, and we need to rectify this in our supposedly modern, evolved society
The gender pay gap is a myth created by the dishonest and believed by the gullible to drive a sick and twisted wedge between the sexes.
It achieves this by the absolute abuse of statistics by taking the mean average of the earnings of men and women and then then screaming out “See! Told you!”.
What it does NOT account for is, on average (mean):
* Women work less hours.
* Women take time off for maternity leave.
* Women pursue careers in communications and HR that pay less than engineering, technology etc.
So yeah, keep on bullshitting.
As per the last count, every sinlge one of the current 8 billion + people have been born to a human female. Free of charge to the state. . Forced or not – access to birth control and abortion is not a right for many. With money or without. With a home or without. And last we checked, all these children are generally raised, housed, bathed, fed, cared for by a majority of females. Even the males ones, even the ones that think as grown up males that females don’t do anything but work part time in HR and yeah, the ones in employment even get some ‘maternity’ leave so that the tears and stiches heal nicely for the next round.
I am sure in the future, once the surgeons in the gender abattoirs have figured how to transplant a uterus onto a males liver/kidney, colon, and once they figured out how to keep these males alive with their uterus transplant, males will be the ones to birth, until then it is as per the most esteemed Marx the unpaid labour of women/human females that the state world wide depends on to replenish their stock of humans for work, wars and reproduction.
But that of course is not work, cause no male has ever birthed a single thing. So it can’t be work.
Jays do you hate or despise women? It feels as if you do, it comes over quite strongly sometimes and negatively.
In the perfect World you offer is a lot of free things .Nothing is free and all those things are paid for by the tax payer .It is only right that the state helps the vunerable people who are suffering with health or mental problems our circumstances change like covid or earthquakes or floods but a line has to be drawn at what is paid for for all other people .
MB spends considered time composing an analysis of needs – :
Improve tomorrow’s world
More maternity/paternity leave
Free ECE in NZ
Improve working conditions
Lift the burden of COL pressures.
Break supermarket duolopy
Provide food in schools
Free public transport
Build education and health capacities
Have the correct tax take from tax avoiders
” Fight for tomorrow – Culture War fights make all the noise, but poor people aren’t sitting around the kitchen table cancelling people for misusing pronouns, they are trying to work out how to pay the bills! ”
RESPONDERS to the crisis – :
=
The solution is – It ‘s the fault of that TQI + lot. ‘cos My vagina is better than your vagina !
Whilst outside my window are real struggles, …. yeah, nah.. where humans go to shit is my hill to die on .
Must up my ratios to have friends and qualify as peaked.
( Subversively Drop my Merch link here )
https://www.redbubble.com/i/sticker/YOU-RULE-YOU-SUCK-Stranger-Things-by-BaileyPerson/82578456.EJUG5
I’ll just re-quack my pronoun theory ad nauseam to @nzlabour.
Nearly FULLY BAKED. Just off to scrub the word ” ADULT” from my tee- shirt logo.
MB spends considered time composing an analysis of needs – :
Improve tomorrow’s world
More maternity/paternity leave
Free ECE in NZ
Improve working conditions
Lift the burden of COL pressures.
Break supermarket duolopy
Provide food in schools
Free public transport
Build education and health capacities
Have the correct tax take from tax avoiders
” Fight for tomorrow – Culture War fights make all the noise, but poor people aren’t sitting around the kitchen table cancelling people for misusing pronouns, they are trying to work out how to pay the bills! ”
RESPONDERS to the crisis – :
=
The solution is – It ‘s the fault of that TQI + lot. ‘cos My vagina is better than your vagina !
Whilst outside my window are real struggles, …. yeah, nah.. where humans go to shit is my hill to die on .
Must up my ratios to have friends and qualify as peaked.
( Subversively Drop my Merch link here )
https://www.redbubble.com/i/sticker/YOU-RULE-YOU-SUCK-Stranger-Things-by-BaileyPerson/82578456.EJUG5
I’ll just re-quack my pronoun theory ad nauseam to @nzlabour.
Nearly FULLY BAKED. Just off to scrub the word ” ADULT” from my tee- shirt logo.
Years ago I met Zelda D’Aprano in Melbourne Oz. She had just spent the day on a project – trying to travel on public transport but paying a quarter less than the ticket price on the basis that women were paid less by this amount, so were being discriminated against by the fare. It would have been in 1970-71 I think.
The next year, these three women founded the Women’s Action Committee to jump start the Women’s Liberation Movement in Melbourne. This organisation tried to get women more involved in activism as “we had passed the stage of caring about a “lady-like” image because women had for too long been polite and ladylike and were still being ignored” (D’Aprano 1995). This led the women to take more militant action on their path to equal pay. These same women founded the Women’s Liberation Centre on Little Latrobe Street in 1972. ..
The Women’s Action Committee kept going, and grew as it went.
They travelled around Melbourne paying only 75% of the fares, because women were only given 75% of the wage of men at the time. Because women weren’t allowed to drink in bars, only in lounges, they did pub crawls across Melbourne…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zelda_D%27Aprano
Fifty years on women are still trying for better wages. But many miss
what is needed. It is strange that women don’t always support other women who are mothers. This is a hard job to do well; encouraging, coaching, chastising, trying to have a good role model as a father. Helping to bring up nice young people with goals in education and skills plus physicality, plus inbuilt controls against things that will deteriorate their lives and personal standing. Not perfectly behaved youngsters, but not mean, able to handle life positively.
The skills and care needed are huge and happy homes skills don’t get learned from factory or office work, or even doing university courses as now. The closest could be the Domestic Science courses that Otago University once ran, and started in 1911.
https://dehanz.net.au/entries/home-science-university-otago/
Now it seems to be low-ranked if at all available, and even the annual Food Cost Survey* is not quoted much in the media. I think house and childcare has settled back into an unskilled-level ‘women’s thing’. It is part of our current mental disease that women bringing up children, even being able to have safe childbirth in an accessable venue with skilled assistance is yesterday’s certainty.
* https://www.otago.ac.nz/humannutrition/research/food-cost-survey/
There are other things affecting wage earners as well as equal pay. There is also the problem of stand-downs after jobs have finished when little money is available for weeks, and the disheartening practice of cutting grants immediately if there has been some savings made – not allowed. Or a short term period of slightly higher wages than usual remuneration.
Women to society have always been a disposable good. Women have always worked in the workforce, they just were not paid at all – women working for the family business/farm, lowly paid – servants work, factory work, etc, badly educated – you don’t need to study you get a husband and kids, and generally just expected to make good with the lot that life gives you.
For women to succeed in such a society a pleasant self effacing attitude is almost a must as someone who questions the status quo would not live a happy life – unless the husband/father would support the intellectual curiosity of their ‘property’
the only difference between Taliban and the rest of us is that we here still pretend to some extend that women – human females are actually human, rather then just chattel. But we are starting to get to Taliban level here too…..i mean we can’t even define what a woman is anymore, or at least we have every single Politian in government who refuses to define it because cowards and fear is them.
And again the oppression of human females is not based on anything else then their sex. IF we called them all men it would be men who would not earn as much as males, and it would be men dying in childbirth cause we underfund our maternity wards, it would men who society expects to just stay home and raise that offspring and clean that house and cook that meal and and and and , and of course all of that free of charge cause society would not have enough money to pay for all the volunteer services that we expect of the birthers.
I’ve always thought that, regarding the pay of female Prime Ministers, MP’s, and CEO’s, it (the pay) ought to be more than their male counterparts due to a lot of circumstances such as typically less support and more stress, and an increase of effects physically and emotionally on women more than men in the same high ranking positions.
Say a male Prime Ministers has an annual salary of $250,000. With a comparable female Prime Minister, a fair pay packet could be $280,000 or $290,000.
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