Kerre Woodham: The burden of parenthood should be shared equally

You have woken up to the news that New Zealand businesses can now take meaningful action to drive down the gender pay gap. You need no longer wait for governments to legislate – the power is in your hands. The launch of an online calculator to help do so was announced yesterday by the Minister for Women, Nicola Gregg. The previous Labour government announced plans last year before the election to require public and private companies with more than 250 workers to publish a gender pay gap report. Earlier in the year, Acting Minister for Women Louise Upston said the Government was committed to addressing inequity in the workplace, but she said “we do not want to overburden businesses with unnecessary costs and regulations.   

So the Gender Pay Gap Toolkit was set up by working with businesses and organisations like Spark, ANZ, Tonkin + Taylor, to make sure it's user friendly and has a common methodology. It was also shaped and road tested, apparently, by many other organisations across the country, including Transpower, the Port of Auckland, Champions for Change, and Global Women. Although the pay gap has reduced steadily from 16.3% in 1998, its stuck at around 9 to 10% for the past decade, except for 2015/2016 when it hit 12%. So, it's come down a bit and now it's stabilised.  

My colleague Heather du Plessis-Allan had a hot take on why the gap remained stubbornly in place, which she shared with her audience last night. It's up to women, she says, not employers to fix the gender pay gap: 

“Here's my tip if you are a woman and you don't want to have a gender pay. Don't take maternity leave. Make the baby's father take the paternity leave and don't always be the one to stay home with the kids when the kids are sick, make the father stay at home with the kids when the kids are sick, because I think that is now part of our problem. We are literally, as women, a more unreliable workforce than men, because think about this: I mean this is brutal, but it's true, right? If you've got an equally qualified man and woman standing in front of you, let's say early 30s, married, but haven't had babies, are you going to hire the lady? Because I don't know about that.  

“I'd look at the lady and go oh, she hasn't had babies yet, so now she can have babies, now she's going to want take a year off for every single baby. Now, when the babies sick, got a bit of a cough, the woman's going stay at home. She's unreliable. The guy is more reliable. Guy gets the job. Right. I know that this is hard, and I know we want it all in the modern age, right. We want heaps of money, we want all the big jobs, and we also want to be the ones who stay at home and raise the babies when they come out. But life is tough, and choices are tough, and I suspect women are going to have to start helping themselves a little bit here by getting the dads to do the heavy lifting too, instead of just complaining that life ain't fair.” 

So she has a point. If you are going to take a couple of years out of the workforce to be the primary caregiver and you’re female, then you're going to have missed work opportunities, missed promotion opportunities, and that's just the way it is. If you're not around for two years, your employer can't gauge just how effective you are, how good at working you are.  

At the same time, we all know the first three years of a child's life are vitally important. Every single child psychologist will tell you that. If you're given $100,000 to put towards your child's education, stay at home for the first three years or employ a primary caregiver to do the same. It just has to be a person who can talk to the baby, speak to the baby, take it out, stimulate it, and it has to be a kind of one-on-one relationship. A best practice according to child psychologists. Not always able to do that, we all just muddle along the best we can. I was back at work when my daughter was six weeks old. I hired a nurse, a young trainee, a graduate nurse to look after her. Not ideal, but needs must. The money had to come in somehow. I tried to keep breastfeeding that first year and managed to do so pretty much, but it was a struggle.  

If you want to have children and many couples do, I think it's a lot easier these days to share the load. I mean, we've had a child sick at home and their parents have divided the time. Dad stayed home three days because he can work from home. Mum has stayed home the last two days to give him the best possible chance of recovery and to allow everybody to get the most important parts of their job done on the days they really have to go into the office. They've had to juggle it between them. It's not expected that the mum has to give up five days of working in the office to stay at home. I just don't think there is that expectation among young parents.  

I think there really should be a shared responsibility between men and women. Perhaps the mother has the first six months off, then the father has six months off, so that when you do have a man and a woman applying for a job, they're both 32, they both have the same level of qualifications for whatever job they're applying for, then an employer can look at them both and go. I know that at some point, if they want children, I'm going to lose that person for six months, be it the man, be it the woman. If there is an expectation that the man will take time off too, an expectation from within the family, from within the community, from within the workforce, that men are just as likely to take six months off as women are, that kind of evens the playing field. So I think Heather had a point: it's not always going to be possible for a woman to give birth and then skip back to work the next day, leaving the man literally to pick up the baby. But I think if there is an expectation that it will be equally shared between men and women, it will help level up the playing field. 

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