Speak Up-KōrerotiaWomen in the workplace

21 September 2016

Male This programme was first broadcast on Canterbury’s community access radio station Plains FM 96.9 and was made with the assistance of New Zealand on Air.

Female Coming up next conversations on human rights with “Speak Up” – “Kōrerotia”, here on Plains FM.

Sally E ngā mana,E ngā reo,E ngā hau e whāTēnā koutou katoaNau mai ki tēnei hōtaka: “Speak Up” – “Kōrerotia”.

Tune in as our guests “Speak Up”, sharing their unique and powerful experiences and opinions and may you also be inspired to “Speak Up” when the moment is right.

Welcome to “Speak Up” – “Kōrerotia” I’m your host Sally Carlton based here in Christchurch. Today’s topic is “Women in the workplace.” We’re going to be thinking about various different things - pay equity, the women’s empowerment principles - all sorts of things and we’ve got three exciting guests with us today. If you could please just kick it off, Jackie?

Jackie Hi I’m Jackie Blue, I work with the Human Rights Commission, I’m the Equal Employment Opportunities Commissioner. I’m also part of our WEPS Committee but I’ll let Angela talk about that later on.

Sally And maybe just to clarify: WEPS is the Women’s Empowerment Principles.

Erin Good morning I’m Erin Ebborn and I’m the director of Ebborn Law Limited. We are a family law firm that specialises in legal aid and Family Court work and Ebborn Law Limited is a signatory to the Women’s Empowerment Principles.

Sally And Angela?

Angela Kia ora I’m Angela McLeod, I’m Vice President of the UN Women National Committee Aotearoa New Zealand and UN Women International and UN Global Contact are the initiators of the Women’s Empowerment Principles.

Sally And Angela could you just let us know, how does UN Women Aotearoa fit in within the International UN Women?

Angela Great question. So UN Women is in New Zealand if I can just shorten it because it’s a bit of a mouthful is that we are an autonomous group. So UN Women based in New York has what they call national committees worldwide so pretty much there’s quite a few, Australia has one, Japan, Norway, across the world and they essentially mandate - if I use “our” as in all of the national committees - our mandates are to raise money to empower women through projects in our area. In New Zealand our area is the Pacific so all of the projects that we do here are to empower women in some way in the Pacific.

Sally And I guess to start our conversation today, why is the topic “Women in the workplace” important and why is it important in 2016?

Jackie I’ll kick off I think. The Human Rights Commission has done a lot of work in labour market metrics and how women fare and it’s all online as a Tracking Equality at Work tool but basically when you look at the tool and you go through the various metrics - and you can filter by age, sex and ethnicity - women are marginalised. They do worse in every level on pay, on employment, in labour force participation. And when you drill down even further it’s not just women, it’s young Māori and Pacific women who are particularly disadvantaged. Women are not doing well in the labour market.

Angela So if I could just jump in here to add to that. One of the things that I didn’t quite say before is UN Women national committees also have a role in highlighting and advocating for gender equality and economic empowerment of women and I think the important thing for us also to understand is that there’s statistics that the Human Rights Commission have found is great because we also have research and there’s international research and New Zealand research to say that if you empower women in the work place economically and socially your bottom line improves. So it makes economic sense.

Jackie Absolutely and I’ll add onto that: I think business is in a powerful position to create positive social change by gender equality in the workplace. Having respectful relationship and transparency and fair practices etc., those dynamics can spill over into wider society. So there’s no question business is in the box seat to do really good stuff.

Erin My background is obviously within the legal profession and it’s been a situation where because women have come through into the profession a bit later, we’ve been told to wait and that if we get more women graduates then eventually they’ll work their way up through the ranks and we’ll begin to have more women judges and more women partners or directors of law firms. Whereas we’ve had equal if not more than women graduates from law schools for decades now and we’re still seeing a situation where only 24% of partners in law firms, 15% of Queens Counsel and 29% of Judges are women. And the trickle up effect of waiting isn’t working and we need more active… and that’s where I see the Women’s Empowerment Principles as playing a role in ensuring that

we have a commitment to seeing women in the work force being progressed.

Jackie Erin do you find that women… Do you think we’re not seeing they’re getting promoting and they’re striving for getting higher and higher up the ladder but they’re not getting it, they’re leaving the profession, is that a problem you’ve noticed?

Erin It is a problem. There was actually a great article in Law Talk, which is the New Zealand Law Society magazine, on women in the profession last year and it’s more than just speculation, it’s clear that women aren’t actually staying in the profession and are leaving in part because of the expectations of the hours, the focus on billable work and the inflexibility sometimes that comes alongside with the culture of a law firm. So it’s not a career that’s remained attractive to women - which is a loss of course to the profession.

Jackie I mean demographically we are an aging population and the fact is we are right here and now we need to retain all our talented workers, all workers for that matter, we can’t afford to let them go and lose those skills. We’re in a situation where we’re going to have to bring migrant labour in to sustain our economy going forward and it’s happening right now so it’s really dumb for businesses to let staff go and they have to go through that whole retraining exercise and it costs money etc. So it makes sense, as Angela was saying, that business leaders step up and create a workplace, an environment that’s great to work in where there is gender equality, where people are treated equally and there is transparency and fair practices and so forth.

Erin It’s also just the right thing to do because we have a lot of… I think a shift in language when we’re talking about women in work to being a business-focused argument which is a powerful argument but also we need to keep alongside that a values-based argument as well around the fact that we need to be having a society which is inclusive. Where there are barriers to participation, looking at addressing those barriers - because people should be entitled irrespective of gender or their ability or disability or ethnicity to participate in the workforce to the fullest of the extent that they are able to do so. So I still like to see discussions around inequality and injustice and what creates exclusion as well as inclusion as well as the important points that you’re raising around an economic requirement to have good participation.

Jackie I mean there was a study done in 2011 by Goldman Sachs and they looked at New Zealand businesses and made the statement that if we got increased participation of women in our labour market - and I presented a graph today which showed that women are way behind men’s participation and particularly Māori and Pacific women are even worse - if we could increase our participation our GDP could increase by 10%. Now that’s a huge economic plus.

Angela It is, Jackie. But also what needs to happen… Because I’ve noticed that there has been an increase of women in the labour market but the gender pay gap… So unless there’s some work or some movement in that as well, I mean the gender pay gap is only one issue in the work place of course but it is one that’s been measured for some time now and one which we could change, then that whole combination of increasing women in the work force and fixing that gender pay gap, as they saying goes Bobs Your Uncle, I mean I don’t like it but from an economic sense that would be part of it but also, Erin, I’ve got a question for you too: is some of the problem with women in the law practices, do they come back to work after spending time at home with family?

Erin I don’t probably know the answer to that but I think if I recall what the information I’ve seen previously is that no, it’s not actually a matter that women are leaving because they’re leaving to have a family and they’re not returning; it’s a matter that women are rejecting the profession as a career choice because of the way it operates.

Angela The culture.

Erin The culture of it and that it’s not gelling with the values of this generation.

Jackie The gender pay gap that Angela raised is very important and it’s a very high level measure that we use to measure inequality between men and women in our labour market and it has really stagnated, it got actually slightly worse last year. And one of the things that the WEPS principles does cover is greater gender pay equity; in other words, making sure women are paid fairly and doing regular audits and checks. And in the strategy document which we launched this morning there’s actually… It’s a great document, it’s modern, it’s up to date, it’s in plain English, it’s not just rhetoric it gives businesses practical things they can do to address things like the gender pay gap so I personally think I would love to see… This isn’t a WEPs policy but my particular passion is I would like to see companies over 250 employees publish their pay gender gaps publically, this is what’s going to happen in the United Kingdom next year, it’s already happening in Australia with companies over 100 employees and I think it’s a powerful motivator for change once you publicise this sort of data.

Sally This idea of naming and shaming.

Jackie Exactly and I think businesses are usually pretty competitive in New Zealand and once they see some good role models and they can see themselves having a wide gap they’ll want to actually make positive change so they can reduce that gap. And having it publicised and knowing whether it’s big, small or indifferent means that they can start drilling down why it’s like that. And I think one of the hugest factors of it is actually women taking career breaks, coming back, their career projectory just falls away and I think that’s a key area, women returning to the work force is a huge factor in the widening gender pay gap.

Angela And also, Erin, to back up the work that you’re doing by being a signatory to the Women’s Empowerment Principles is that what I see is the whole gender norm and the structures of the workplace need to change like you were suggesting, the culture needs to change. And I think the Women’s Empowerment Principles is a really good road map or good guideline for businesses to be able to do that.

Erin I agree with that and we need to be acknowledging that it’s a systemic issue and that’s not a matter of only having women in visible positions and mentoring and leadership but also that there needs to be actual action taken to ensure that the barriers to women’s participation in the work force are addressed because we can’t just sit and do nothing or say it’s a matter of role modelling and aspiration as opposed to actually taking clear steps and making clear commitments and setting targets and reporting and praising as well when that occurs.

Jackie Agreed.

Sally Well that seems like a good place to have our first break. Erin, you’ve chosen a song for us - ‘Bread and Roses’ - was there a reason for that?

Erin I love this song. I think it’s inspiring but also because it highlights in it as well that the advancement of women is not just about our advancement, also the advancement of men alongside us as well as a partnership.

MUSIC BY MIMI FARINA – BREAD & ROSESSally Nau mai hoki mai, welcome back to “Speak Up” – “Kōrerotia”. We’re

speaking with Jackie Blue, Erin Ebborn and Angela McLeod about women in the workplace. We’re going to kick off this segment thinking about why on earth are we still having to discuss women’s rights in 2016?

Jackie New Zealand has been applauded and noted and paraded around as being the first country to give women the vote but the fact is we’ve dined out on that far too long. We have issues of gender representation in leadership, we have terrible violence against women stats, we don’t have gender equity in pay so we’re still fighting the fight from the feminist… we’re fighting back in the ‘70s let alone way back in Kate Shepherd’s day. It’s appalling that we still only have 30% women in Parliament and so forth, it’s terrible.

Angela And I think for me too is that there’s actually a lack of leadership in it so the priorities aren’t conducive to the empowerment of women. So for instance the Sherwin Report about the foreign tax haven, he was asked to do that report in April, I think he reported back in something like June and the Government has taken on the recommendations. Crikey! The joint working group on pay equity was put together last year, they were a month late in getting their reports out and we’re still waiting for a response from the Government. I think not only have we been sitting on

our laurels around that whole first nation in the world to give women the vote, we just don’t have leadership in that space either.

Erin It’s also about making it relevant to young women today because it disheartens me when I hear people say, “I’m not a feminist but…” And then go on to say something which is naturally feminist. As though feminism is an ‘F’ word that we shouldn’t be talking about anymore or that the job was done and that was something that women did back in the ‘70s and “Didn’t they burn their bras and something like that?” And actually no, I don’t think they did in New Zealand ever. To make sure that we’re bringing in that generation with us and the statistics that Jackie was talking about are really appalling and they’re unjustifiable from the economic sense that she’s talking about and from a human rights sense.

Jackie Angela mentioned about the joint working group recommendations on pay equity principles across the labour market, they’ve come out with recommendations which I think have been supported by everyone and it’s tantalisingly close that we could have a mechanism to get pay equity where jobs are revalued; women’s jobs are typically undervalued, underpaid and seen as women’s work. Where they can be revalued as far as work, effort and skill goes and that is going to be huge when it comes. I believe it will come, I’m an optimist, it can’t happen soon enough quite frankly.

Sally One thing that strikes me when we’re talking about women’s rights - today particularly, I mean the sort of era that we’re talking in - is how does the idea of women’s rights sit along LGBTQI rights which is such a strong movement at the moment and really challenging this idea of a gender binary?

Angela My thoughts on that - and it also goes with ethnic diversity when we’re talking on boards and things like that - for me it’s about actually my concern is we can’t get gender right so how can we get any other thing right when we can’t… And we’ve had women voting since the 1890s, we haven’t got it right how are we going to get the rest right?

Erin I think feminism has long critiqued the construct of gender and that’s basically the essence of feminism itself is how gender is a social construct and then how that construct constrains particular sectors of society from advancing or participating. So I don’t see women’s rights or feminist theory at all contrary to the advancements of the arguments around non-binary perspectives, they’re not at odds with each other and we were talking about rights, there isn’t a limited amount of rights where if one portion of society gets some certain rights that another portion of society somehow or other miraculously ends up with less, that’s not a pie to divide up. And so I can see that the two trains of thought can actually intercept with each other.

Jackie It’s about everyone’s human rights. I think at the end of the day we all have equal human rights no matter who we are or how we define

ourselves and the fact is LGTBI groups along with disabled groups, Māori and Pacific groups, young people are all marginalised in the workforce and have vulnerabilities unique to some of those groups and that’s not right and that’s what we have to address.

Erin So again it comes back to ensuring that what we’re doing is flexible so that we’re not being exclusive in what we’re doing and the original values of equity, justice and inclusiveness.

Sally That sounds great. Now thinking about those: what are sectors in which women are performing well or which are I guess a good representation of women? We’ve spoken about the legal sector but what other sectors are there?

Jackie They’re doing well professionally, more and more women are graduating with tertiary education but the professions they’re going into typically are nursing or teaching as opposed to engineering and other areas which don’t pay as well so that’s in part also the pay gender gap. Women are dominating areas which are not well paid, they’re dominating the caring, the clerical, the admin and the cleaning sectors, not well paid at all.

Angela Traditional women’s work. Back to what Jackie said before about not valuing women’s work: what’s also really interesting is that the women that are doing the engineering degrees and all that sort of thing alongside their male counterparts, within their first year out into the workplace the pay gap is 6% to 8% and that’s nothing to do with anything else except… As far as we can tell, anything else except, I don’t know… They’re just women in the engineering field that are paid less than the male that came out of university at the same time as them.

Jackie And even a small gap at the start of a career just widens in a crazy way after several years, it just keeps blowing out.

Sally Do we have a sense of why there’s that pay gap? Particularly in those initial years.

Erin I think it’s difficult to know what to ask for sometimes. When you’re starting off as a graduate people don’t talk about salaries generally so I think it’s difficult to know where to pitch yourself and so if you were entering an individual negotiation then if you don’t know even where to start or what to ask for or how to value what you’re worth then you’re going to start off at a lower footing in the first place. Whereas if we know more around what different salaries are for different positions and different comparisons then you’ve got more of a background to start with.

Angela And also there’s anecdotal evidence that often the goalposts aren’t the same. So even though you’re not sure of your value when you first come out of university, women and men can be offered a different salary range. When you talk about a salary range, a man will be told that it’s $50,000 to $60,000 and the woman will be told it’s $40,000 to $50,000. So there’s

that as well and that’s where this whole changing the constructs or the norms within the workplace is important.

Jackie I showed a graph this morning from the State Service Commission of 46,000 employees and it showed that even in the early 20s when careers were starting there was a pay gender gap of about 2% and I’m sure they would advertise jobs saying we’re in this salary band A, B, C or D so a person going for that job would know that they’re going to be in this band but clearly women are settling for the lower part of the band not the upper part of the band; that’s my interpretation of it.

Erin And the information you’re presenting was showing a much better outcome within the state sector, as well, than in the private sector so I think that’s where if you’re making a commitment to Women’s Empowerment Principles it’s also about ensuring that you’re reviewing salaries on a regular basis and making sure that what is being provided is within a market norm and that you are actively giving employees salary increases rather than waiting for them to ask.

Jackie Exactly and that’s what a good employer does. And clearly Erin, I’ve read your story, you are a great employer, truly. She has to kick her employees out on a Friday because they want to stay late, truly, and she’s got talented, committed, passionate, loyal staff as a result of the workplace she’s created.

Erin They are fantastic staff.

Angela And see that’s good for productivity, isn’t it, across the board?

Erin It is but I would still like them to go home a bit earlier and relax a bit more!

Angela I get that!

Sally If you treat people well they want to give more back, though.

Jackie No question about it, decent work, decent pay, decent conditions pays off in all ways on all levels.

Erin It absolutely does and one of the practices as well that Law Society is promoting is the principle of practising well with healthy mind, healthy body and healthy business practice because the profession has been one that’s been often high stress, very prone to alcohol misuse or depression and so there needs to be that shift around how we treat our staff and creating that space for flexibility to be able to ensure that I think… I think that would help engage and retain women in the profession as well because of that flexibility and the ability to balance better between the expectations of the role.

Sally Well that might be time for our next break and Jackie we’ve got your

song.

Jackie My song is ‘I Am Woman’ by Helen Reddy and I’ve chosen that because women are powerful, we’re half the world’s population - actually 51% of the world’s population - and we’re part of the solution not part of the problem and we need to bring through, empower our young girls, empower our women and I tell you countries, societies will prosper and with women in charge, equally in charge we would have world peace. Women do not want war, they want peace. We need women at our frontlines negotiating peace settlements not a bunch of men.

MUSIC BY HELEN REDDY – I AM WOMANSally This is “Speak Up” – “Kōrerotia” here on Plains FM 96.9. I’m your host

Sally Carlton and we’re with Jackie Blue, Erin Ebborn and Angela McLeod talking about women in the workplace. To kick off this section we’re going to be thinking about some of the factors that are less equitable and in this place we’ve got particularly ethnicity and disability and also some of the factors that can be put in place to try and increase equity, including around gender.

Jackie Well to pick up with disability it is a huge area of concern. I mean there are a lot of groups that are marginalised in the workplace but disabled people are the worst, they truly are and one of the problems is we don’t have enough data, that’s only collected after every Census - that’s every five years - so that’s a problem in itself. No-one is collecting the data in the workplace, the public service through the State Service Commission has made a promise that they are going to start doing this and they’re going to start collecting data and they set up a work group to look at definitions because that’s a problem. What’s a definition of disability? Your disability is not my disability. So they’ve done that and they’ve also brought out a toolkit for employers who have disabled employees and that’s a huge loss of potential, I think only 50% of disability people in the working age disability group are actually in work and there’s a heap of people that would want work and are trying to find work but can’t get it. So that is a problem and it’s going to be focus and part of my work going forward, it needs more focus, we’ve had some great success though here.

I’ll talk about Project 300 in Christchurch, they took 300 people off the benefit who were on the old sickness or invalids benefit and they got Workbridge in to assess them. They went into employers and said we want you to open up some spaces for people with a disability because that was one of the criteria, they were on a benefit and they had a disability and so they chose 300 of them and they got employers to make up vacancies and MSD helped with funding new services or changing the environment so it would suit. They got a huge number into work and it’s been sustained work and that is astonishing. So it can be done and it’s good to have diversity in the workplace, everyone brings different things to work and people with disability bring a whole different perspective. So I want to make a plug for disability and employees and the fact that

they’re so marginalised but even in disability there’s even greater prejudice and discrimination at people with a mental illness because that’s invisible. People who can understand a wheelchair or who have a visual impairment, that’s different, but the invisible disabilities are a real concern and to me they suffer even worse discrimination. But there has been a great project in Christchurch and it needs to be applauded, I think they’re rolling it out in other centres.

Angela There’s also been some concern at the UN, there’s the Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women - or CEDAW which is what we call it quickly, the acronym - so CEDAW has identified that disabled women are doubly discriminated and so they’ve got some recommendations around what the state party or the countries can do to eliminate that. But I have personal experience with that because I was involved with a car accident and so physically there’s some things that I struggle with because my biomechanics have changed with that and what was really interesting is that when I was trying to get back into the workforce after five years of doing rehab and part-time work it was actually really hard, you had to be careful because there was an honesty that you needed to be about that actually I need to be on your… I need to be on the special assistance list in an evacuation or stressful situation and people automatically think the worst. And I think that it took a long while and some really good support from the ACC case manager and some other people and actually getting out and actually getting in front of some of the agencies, essentially it was actually personal contact that got me back into the workforce and people that I’d been talking to. But I think that it’s a real issue and at least the UN, the CEDAW committee have identified and they’ve identified it for New Zealand and I know that there’s been a lot of work done on it and especially with the other convention and the rights with people with disabilities, persons with disabilities, there’s some work happening in that space.

Jackie And for pre-employment there’s a real “damned if you, do damned if you don’t” disclose that you have a disability. Damned if you do, you might not get the job because they feel you wouldn’t be able to cope and if you don’t disclose and later on it becomes evident and you didn’t disclose it at the interview and that’s a concern. So really real issues with employing people with disabilities.

Sally And what are some of the policies and practices that you’ve seen that are helping to empower women in the workplace, with disabilities or not?

Erin Well I think you have pockets, I know Z Energy have made a real focus of employing people with disability, they have made it one of their focal points and I applaud them for that but I don’t think otherwise… I mean companies aren’t collecting data on people with disabilities, that’s the last thing they’ll ever think about. They’re getting used to the idea of “Yes we need to promote women, we need to have greater diversity etc.” but people with disability it’s not getting any focus at the moment. So I can’t really say there’s any practices happening because it’s not really a big

thing in the workplace at the moment.

Angela No and that’s a shame and I think the… It’s a real shame.

Sally What are your perspectives on quotas or targets or aspirations in terms of gender equity - and I suppose other elements of diversity as well - but particularly in terms of gender?

Jackie Good question. I’ll kick off and I’m sure it’ll create conversation. Women on boards in the private sector and the senior management teams – pathetic! We have women in private sector senior management teams are about 19%/20%, we’ve fallen from about 30%. 20% women on senior management teams in New Zealand businesses? That’s dreadful, it’s appalling. Women on private boards through stock exchange listed companies, we’re tracking at 17% improved by about 5% over the last three years and it’s still going to take 15 years before we get 50%. Women in Parliament – 30%. And we’ve been like that for the last 18 or so years, ditto, I can go on and on and on. Is it going to happen by natural osmosis? It doesn’t look like it is so yeah…

Norway has got 40% women on their boards and they’ve done it through a quota law and it said to their businesses, “If you don’t have 40% women on your boards we’re going to dissolve you” and guess what?! There was a massive improvement from about 9% to 40% overnight virtually. We need quotas and that’s going to be controversial but I think the time is for quotas, let’s have that debate.

Angela And you know I agree and it’s interesting because the CEDAW Committee for years has been saying, instead of saying quotas you could use temporary special measures and if somebody ever turns around and says oh we don’t… because there’s this kind of fear of using the term ‘mandatory’ or ‘quota’ or ‘temporary special measures’ - they do it all the time in a drought for goodness sake so it’s not like it’s not undoable. It’s like whenever the Government puts up money, councils put up money for certain things that oh there’s an emergency, these are temporary special measures, we’re going to put $500,000 towards the farmers of South Canterbury - not that we shouldn’t be doing that, please don’t get me wrong - but we can do it as a country for other things. And it goes back to my original thing around priorities, that the priorities aren’t there for that support for such a movement as quota or a temporary special measure.

And the really interesting thing about the Norway model that Jackie was just mentioning is that Arni Hole who was the Minister involved in that and I think it’s called Gender Equality and Children or something, the ministry – she was saying that their legislation is actually about the underrepresented gender, of course it was mostly that women were underrepresented but on boards where it was underrepresented in men the minimum has to be 40% so it goes both ways and there’s a huge shift happened when they also included compulsory paid parental leave for

men so then that changed and then so did that whole women on boards. It was brilliant and I agree with you entirely, Jackie.

Erin So what you get when you have a quota is a cultural shift and that’s the avenue to at least affect that change because once you change that culture around the board table then you’re more likely then to be able to sustain the diversity around the board.

Jackie It’s basically destructing the norm and women aren’t necessarily seen as leaders and you bring them through as leaders and then they are seen as leaders and then you change the culture and you can take away the temporary special measure because it will happen naturally. But you need that to force the change to begin with.

Erin What I find offensive when people talk about quotas is the suggestion that by doing so you’re only going to get really average women on the board.

Jackie Yes that offends me too.

Erin As if there’s not this amazing pool of talented women and that the women for some reason aren’t as good as the men who are already on the board and that by removing one male off the board you’re going to somehow end up with someone who is less competent. And I find that appalling but that’s one of the arguments that often stands to be raised when you talk about quotas is that oh we’re going to have people who are inadequate or who are only there because of their gender and it’s just so untrue.

Jackie Or we don’t believe in quotas, we choose on merit.

Angela I love that!

Jackie There aren’t enough good women out there. Well who defines what merit is? It’s usually the boys define what merit is and it’s boys choosing boys and it’s this closed loop going around talking to each other how fantastic they are.

Angela And I’m all for mere hypocrisy if it’s clinical, like this list of skillsets that you tick off but it isn’t, it never is, it’s got values and behaviours and all those comfort things and being able to play golf on a Friday afternoon, it’s just ridiculous.

Erin Sometimes just for fun I say wouldn’t it be amazing if Parliament was 70% women and only 30% men and you get these horrified looks around the table and people go but that’s not fair and I go yeah I know, it’s not is it.

Angela And then there’s research to suggest - and I haven’t been able to lay my finger on it but I quote it a lot which is probably not that good - but there

is research to suggest that in a room of people when there are about 17% women, the men think it’s 30% and when there’s 33% women, they think it’s a takeover and it’s over 50%, there’s this whole perception thing that we have to deal with.

Erin And yet the women who are in these positions, who we think of when we think of our women leaders, they’re the exception, they’re not the norm and yet they’re being portrayed as being the norm and therefore because this one person here managed to do it then therefore everyone else should be able to do it just anyway because.

Jackie And we like to crow the fact that we’ve had two female Prime Ministers, we had a Chief Justice who was a female, we had the Speaker of the House was a female and there was some other person who was a female, about four people all at the same time in these top jobs and we made it as a country. What rubbish! That lasted for just -I did the calculations - it lasted for only 17 months. And I’m afraid we can’t dine out on that either anymore.

Sally Angela we’re just going to have our final song, though, and we’ll get back into this fascinating discussion and this is your choice, The Eurythmics.

Angela Oh great. Now I grew up on the Eurythmics, for my sins I grew up through the 1980s, they were the formative years when I was a teenager and leaving school and home and going to university and one of the really interesting things is that the reason that I got through those years is because I had sisters and I had sisters at home and sisters as in my good girlfriends and this is why I like this song, because it’s part of that part of growing out and finding out that actually I am able to advocate on behalf of women and this is why it’s a good song for meMUSIC BY ARETHA FRANKLIN WITH EURYTHMICS – SISTERS ARE DOING IT FOR THEMSELVES.

Sally Welcome back to “Speak Up” – Kōrerotia”. We’re speaking about women in the workplace and just in this final segment there’s a few things I’d like to touch on, one of which is policies that companies can put in place around family violence and we’ve heard about how this is such a big issue in New Zealand and the ways in which businesses can take a role in this space.

Jackie It’s just so prevalent, we lead the developed world virtually in violence against women stats, it’s appalling and it’s so prevalent. Employers have got to assume that there are employees who are victims of family violence and they are bringing that experience with them to work, they are probably disengaged from work, they’re probably not as productive as they could be and ultimately the business is paying for that loss of productivity. They are in a perfect position to create policy to help support those victims and I just think it’s a no-brainer of a policy. We only have two companies that do have such a policy publicly, that is The Warehouse and our spy agency GCSB though I do know there are many other corporates who are not far away from having their policies done up

but it can’t happen soon enough.

Angela And there’s been a lot of work done too, Suzanne Snively and the PSA have done a lot of work around the cost of violence against women in the workplace and there’s also a piece of legislation – well it’s not a legislation it’s actually a bill waiting for the little biscuit tin for the draw - around kind of legislating that sort of behaviour from businesses, that businesses can provide for support for victims of violence. It is a no-brainer and it’s just really sad that we have such an appalling rate and can’t wait to see some more businesses come on board.

Erin It’s also difficult for women - and I specifically say women because the majority of protection orders that we still do are all for women, and it is still very much a gender issue - is trying to get the time off work to be able to come in and either see a lawyer or speak with a refuge worker to be able to gain support. I mean, many people still think of the refuge movement as being a safe house when actually the services they provide are so much beyond that in terms of advocacy and also counselling and family violence awareness so being able to ensure that your employee is able to be connected into a refuge and also to be able to obtain legal advice which they often need to do during work hours. They might need to attend Court in which case that’s obviously always during work hours. It’s incredibly difficult for employees who are not in management roles, where they don’t have the flexibility to be able to chop and change and fit their hours around their work to be able to come and see to get those protection orders in place which are often vital to be able to provide that space for victims of violence to be able to have that security of their home environment through an occupation order or the barrier that protection order puts in place – for them to be able to heal from that violence. And we love the work that we do with the refuges because of the amazing change that you see once there’s been that space between the person that comes in and that first appointment, who is often under so much strain and where they are in six months’ time with a new lease on life and so much vibrancy and energy.

Jackie I’m so impressed with Ebborn Law does in working with women who are victims of violence but a family violence policy in the workplace would cover that. Like the standard one that’s used in Australia and businesses use in New Zealand is they allow up to ten days annual leave for leave to attend important appointments, can we take in half a day here or a block of time there or whatever but over the course of a year and just hearing you say how important it is for women to be able to get legal advice, get away from work to do those appointments and how it can change lives. It’s just so important that business gets behind this.

Erin I’d also challenge employers to actually contribute towards the costs of legal fees for that matter, too, because while we have legal aid available and there’s no repayments required on legal aid for doing a protection order if people meet the income threshold, there’s still that gap as well between people who can’t afford legal fees but are also not eligible for

legal aid and if employers mean it when they say that they’re going to support their employees through family violence potentially even helping with that crisis period with financing the legal fees would go a long way towards supporting their staff.

Sally The other topic I’d like to just raise before we finish up is the idea of policies around maternity, paternity, parental leave and how that can empower women in the workplace as well.

Jackie At the moment we have 18 weeks of paid parental leave, we’re not at six months and that’s obviously the idea and I’m sure that will come in time. What we would like to see at the Commission is that men have their own parental leave of their own. At the moment it can be shared between the primary caregiver and the partner but there’s no separate entitlement for the men. Men need to step up in their caring responsibilities and I think that’s a crucial part that needs to happen.

Angela And I think it’s about that language that you just highlighted too, if we really focused on the fact that it’s parental leave and look at the examples like I mentioned before about Norway where the men have compulsory parental leave, that it’s a shared responsibility and there’s some great stuff being done by the businesses around that. So I know for example Coca Cola, they’re a signatory to the Women’s Empowerment Principles and they’ve got a great system where… Of course at the moment it’s the majority women that go on parental leave, they have a support system for them, they’re able to carry on having discussions with their workmates and they can come along and be involved in bits and pieces. ANZ have got a system where they carry on contributing to KiwiSaver so there’s some great work being done and I think this is the great thing about the Women’s Empowerment Principles too with the signatories is that they’re able to share this and learn from each other and there’s some really good things going on that we can all learn from each other and take on board.

Jackie And the strategy document that WEPS has produced is a blueprint, is giving all those practical steps for what you can do as a business and it takes the businesses through it so it’s achievable and it’s not overwhelming. So we want all businesses to sign up to Women’s Empowerment Principles.

Sally That sounds like a perfect place to finish up. Have you got any final comments before we say kia ora?

Angela No I just want to say kia ora, thank you.

Erin It’s been a great discussion, thank you very much.

Jackie I’ve thoroughly enjoyed it Sally, thank you for organising.

Sally Thank you very much everybody and check out our Facebook page, we

will be putting up some of these comments that people have been mentioning here.

Angela Great. Thank you bye.

Sally Bye.