Women in leadership

Center for the Advancement of Working Women
Tokyo
Japan

Rau rangatira ma, tenei te mihi ki a koutou i runga i te kaupapa o te ra – mana wahine. Tena koutou, tena koutou, tena ra tatau katoa.

In New Zealand it is customary on occasions like this to greet distinguished guests in the language of New Zealand’s indigenous people, te reo Maori, and I have done that to welcome you to this gathering to discuss the status of women.

Nihon no minasama konnichiwa. [Greetings everyone.]

May I begin by acknowledging the Japanese Minister of State for Gender Equality and New Zealand’s Ambassador. I wish to congratulate their efforts and that of the Japanese government’s Gender Equality Bureau and our Embassy here in Japan for the work they have done in initiating this dialogue between our two countries. It is important to acknowledge that this is a dialogue, because, given that many of the challenges we face in New Zealand are similar to those you face in Japan, there is much that we can learn from each other.

I will begin today with what New Zealand is doing to make it easier for women to enter and remain in the paid workforce, while balancing their roles as mothers and care-givers. I will then talk about our pay and employment equity initiatives, before discussing women in leadership – especially business leadership.

I will end by looking at what is perhaps the most difficult challenge for all countries that already have in place comprehensive laws and policies to promote women’s participation and that is the challenge of changing the societal attitudes that lock women out of achieving their full potential in society.

Background
But first a little history: New Zealand has a long and proud record of promoting the rights of women ever since we led the world in granting women the right to vote. That was back in 1893 – and just a few days ago I hosted a celebration in Parliament to mark the 114th anniversary of Suffrage Day. I used the event to encourage women to vote in the local body elections, which are currently underway in New Zealand.

In the first half of last century, New Zealand was often a leader in social reform that benefited women and we were the first nation to introduce a comprehensive social security system in the 1930s. Since that time there have been incremental steps to eliminate both legislative and de facto discrimination against women right up to the present day, with New Zealand lifting our last remaining reservation to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women this year.

The other thing that people know about New Zealand is that we have a woman Prime Minister. In fact three of our four top constitutional roles – Prime Minister, Parliament’s Speaker and Chief Justice (who is the head of the judiciary) are all held by women, and the fourth position – the Governor-General – was also held by a woman until last year.

It is great that we have women like Prime Minister, Helen Clark, to serve as role models for young women, but having a few women in very prominent positions does not mean that the barriers to women achieving leadership positions have evaporated in New Zealand. I will come back to the difference between perception and reality in a moment, but I want to first address the issues that are much more relevant to the everyday realities women face, most importantly how to balance having a family and a job.

Work-life Balance
Supporting women to have better choices about participation in paid work contributes to a number of the government's goals, including what I would describe as economic resilience. This is really important for women who may be raising children on their own, or who have taken time out of the paid workforce, disrupting the career pathway, or whose circumstances change unexpectedly. By keeping a connection to the paid workforce, the risks associated with each of these are minimised.

This works both ways of course. New Zealand has a labour shortage – our unemployment rate is now only 3.6 percent and in these circumstances it makes no sense to under-utilise the talents of just over 50 percent of the population.

Interestingly, making work and caring more compatible may also be a way of supporting increased fertility rates. An OECD study from 2005 showed that countries with policies that reduced the costs of raising children, like childcare, availability of part-time work and longer leave entitlements, had higher fertility rates.

In New Zealand we have identified that we need a co-ordinated set of policies and responses, because the circumstances, aspirations and preferences of women and their families are diverse, and will change throughout people’s lifetimes.

That there is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach was a key message from the OECD’s Babies and Bosses work programme, which looked at policies for reconciling work and family and how those policies were working in a range of countries, including Japan and New Zealand.

To improve women’s access to work, while recognising that women remain the principal child carers in the family, we need to do several things, including:

• ensuring women’s access to quality work, which involves moving towards more flexible work practices than currently exist in New Zealand or Japan;
• providing good access to services, such as high quality childcare, that allow women to make genuine choices about how and when they work;
• making it easy for women to transition in and out of work with minimal consequences, for instance by having flexible leave provisions;
• ensuring equitable reward for work – because pay discrimination distorts the choices available to families about how work and care might be shared; in other words, if unpaid leave needs to be taken if a child is sick, and if men are paid more than women, then the decision for a woman to stay at home may be purely one of economics rather than genuine choice; and finally
• supporting men’s choices about involvement in family life by making it easier for them to participate in the raising of their children and the running of the household.

New Zealand has done a lot in the last few years to improve the choices available to women and their families about work and care. Last year the government launched the Choices for Living, Caring and Working Plan of Action. This plan brings together work in the different areas that impact on parents’ choices to ensure that developments are coordinated.

Working for Families
The first focus of this plan is ensuring a reasonable minimum level of income for families. The Working for Families package introduced by the government in 2005 provides substantial tax credits to working families with dependent children. About three quarters of New Zealand families benefit from the package; and it is has been estimated that 70,000 children have been lifted over the income poverty threshold as a result.

Working for Families provides good financial incentives for at least one parent to be in paid work, while reducing the financial pressure on families, particularly sole parents. And as most sole parents are women, this is also a key means of improving long-term economic outcomes for these women.

Childcare
The second major focus of the government in this area is on improving childcare services. We launched a ten-year strategic plan for early childhood education in 2001 and we have made a substantial investment in quality service provision since then. This includes establishing a target of all early childhood education teachers in these services being qualified and registered teachers, or in training towards qualifications, by 2012.

The government provides subsidies for the cost of childcare to low and middle income families, and recently we have greatly extended both eligibility for childcare subsidies and subsidy rates. Two months ago we also introduced 20 free hours of early childhood education each week for all three and four year olds in participating teacher-led services. This latest measure is universally available, which means it is not means-tested against parental income.

Out of School Services
This year, the government also released a draft five-year action plan for the development of the out of school services sector. These are the services that provide care for school age children before and after the school day and during the school term holidays. This plan will fill what was previously a significant gap in the continuum of support for families. The plan proposes measures to improve the supply of quality out of school services and widen the focus of those services.

Improving the availability of high quality, affordable childcare and out of school services removes barriers to participation in paid work for many women, and improves the financial return they get for their work. At the same time it can substantially improve educational outcomes for children, particularly those from more disadvantaged backgrounds. New Zealand research on outcomes from early childhood education has shown that where quality is high, the benefits are ongoing. And international studies show a strong association between quality out of school services and reduced truancy, increased leadership skills and better results at school.

That is why we have invested strongly in quality. And although the out of school services sector is still at an early stage of development, I can confirm that quality will also feature strongly in future policy.

Paid Parental Leave
The third area we have focused on is paid parental leave. New Zealand has long had the requirement that employers provide 12 months parental leave, but that entitlement was unpaid until 2002 when 12 weeks paid parental leave was first introduced. Paid parental leave has been progressively extended since that time to 14 weeks and most recently to include the self-employed. A recent review of the scheme shows that paid parental leave hasn't been taken up by men, with less than 1 percent of the weeks taken having been transferred to fathers. The government will be keeping the scheme under review so it can be improved over time.

Work-life Balance Project
Of course the demands of raising a family do not end when the children are old enough to go into early childhood education or to attend school, and government is seeking to address the wider work-life balance issues, including the need for flexible working arrangements.

The New Zealand government established a work-life balance project in 2003, which has gathered data on work-life balance practices in workplaces and consulted on what work-life balance means to New Zealanders. We have also developed a workplace project where individual workplaces are supported to identify work-life balance issues and to trial solutions.

Many more women now need to combine work with other responsibilities; for example caring for children and aging parents at the same time (a group sometimes referred to as 'the sandwich generation'). More flexible work practices are therefore critical if women are to balance these competing demands. This flexibility is particularly important to New Zealanders because, like people in Japan, our average working hours are very long compared to other countries.

Pay and Employment Equity
The fourth major policy focus for women in employment is pay and employment equity. New Zealand, in fact, passed legislation guaranteeing women equal pay more than 30 years ago yet women still only earn on average 88 percent of what men earn. So although discrimination is illegal, that stubborn pay gap exists, supported by gender segregation and a subtle but real undervaluing of “women’s work”.

As one of the country’s largest employers, the government has decided we need to lead by example. We have developed a pay and employment equity plan of action, to ensure that we have gender equity in the core public service and within the public health and education sectors.

The plan promotes equal pay for work of equal value by providing tools and processes that enable government organisations to understand the value of work being undertaken by women, to recognise when that work is not being rewarded equitably and to respond to any issues identified.

Women in Leadership
Another major area of interest for me as Minister of Women’s Affairs is the question of women in leadership.

As I said earlier, the fact that we have had women holding such prominent positions, there is a perception that there are no longer any barriers facing women’s participation in any sphere. The Census of Women’s Participation, prepared by the Human Rights Commission and the New Zealand Centre for Women and Leadership, shows that women continue to be under-represented in leadership roles in most sectors of the New Zealand economy. Judy McGregor, our next speaker, is the Equal Employment Opportunities Commissioner who has spearheaded this report.

The report highlights the fact that we may have a woman Prime Minister, but still only a third of Members of Parliament, and about a quarter of Cabinet Ministers, are women.
This happens to be a significant improvement over the year I entered politics in 1990, when around a quarter of MPs and only 10 percent of the Cabinet were women, but we could still do better.

However, in much of the private sector, the situation is worse. For example, at the time of the Census, women made up only:

• 16.9 percent of university professors and associate professors
• 17.2 percent of partners in top legal firms (which is my profession), and
• 7.1 percent of directors of the Top 100 companies on the New Zealand stock exchange (NZSX)

Thinking about that last figure, a comparison with New Zealand’s state sector is interesting. The Ministry of Women’s Affairs’ Nominations Service has just undertaken its third whole-of-government stock-take of membership of state sector boards and committees and found that women now represent 42 percent of the total government-appointed membership of those boards – up another one percentage point from the figures in the 2006 Census, which I have been quoting. That’s still not equal membership, but it’s a lot better than 7 percent, and it is a figure that is steadily improving.

So what makes the state sector different in this regard? In my view it can all be credited to the level of the government’s commitment to the goal. Unlike previous approaches, this government has set itself a target of 50 percent participation of women on state sector boards and committees by 2010. This doesn’t mean quotas, or 50 percent on every board – it just means that across all the boards there should be about equal participation of men and women if we are making the best use of the whole talent of our nation.

The other thing the government has done is to recognise that we all tend to go to our own networks first when looking for people to help out, including shoulder tapping for committees or boards.

One of the ways of ensuring that women’s names are being considered is the Nominations Service of the Ministry of Women’s Affairs. The Service maintains a database of suitable women, built up over many years and continuously updated. It works closely with nominating agencies to understand their needs. It then uses its database to find women who have the attributes needed for the job, and puts them forward. So the Ministry is not doing the appointing – it just makes sure women are being considered. You still need a government that thinks that appointing women is important. This government does and I make a strong business case in support of that.

Getting more women onto business boards is not just a matter of equity – there is a growing body of international research that indicates that it is, as the title of one Canadian study puts it, ‘not just the right thing, but the bright thing’.

Some studies have found a correlation between stronger financial performance and better representation of women on boards. A 2001 Catalyst study of 353 Fortune 500 companies, for example, found that the group of companies with the highest representation of women on their top management teams experienced better financial performance than the group of companies with the lowest women’s representation. Return on equity was 35 percent higher, and total return to shareholders was 34 percent higher.

This study and others are pointing to a number of potential benefits for companies from diversity on boards and it makes sense. Groups that have more diverse skills, knowledge and experience have the potential to consider a greater range of perspectives, making higher quality decisions; such teams can leverage their diversity to avert and solve problems; and greater diversity in leadership can help a company build its reputation as a responsible corporate citizen that understands and is responsive to its community.

As one report said : ‘… the most fundamental business rationale for a company’s commitment to greater diversity in the boardroom, like its commitment to diversity at all levels, is a simple and compelling one – the desire to find and employ the best talent’.

I’m not suggesting that the New Zealand public sector model would work for the private sector in New Zealand (or, for that matter, in Japan), and as I have said it’s the government’s commitment that has brought about real change, however publicising the importance of diversity and supporting the establishment of private sector databases is the direction we are following in New Zealand.

Changing Attitudes
The final comments that I want to make relate to attitudes and sex role stereotyping. Although much has changed in New Zealand society over the last few decades, traditional norms about gender roles are still prevalent, as they are in most countries, including Japan. While women are doing more paid work than at any time in the past, unpaid work remains unevenly shared, creating pressure on women to be ‘superwomen’.

One recent New Zealand study of working families with dependent children found that 94 percent of parents surveyed agreed that housework and childcare should be equally shared when both partners are in full-time paid work.

However only a third of parents in households where both partners had equally demanding jobs, also equally shared the housework – and just over a half stated they equally shared childcare. The campaign that ran in the 1980s had as its slogan: ‘Girls can do anything’; I have been emphasising that this was not meant to mean that girls should do everything.

Somewhat ironically, the labour force still remains to a large extent segregated along traditional gender lines. At the time of New Zealand’s 2006 Census, 47 percent of employed women in New Zealand were working in occupations that were at least 70 percent female and 52 percent of men were working in occupations that were at least 70 percent male.

This indicates that, while it is now acceptable for women to have families and pursue careers, changes in family roles and adjustments to the way we work that this implies are still taking place. This phenomenon is common to many countries; the United Kingdom’s Equal Opportunities Commission recently describing it as the ‘unfinished social revolution’.

These are deeply-rooted concepts and will take time to change. Government can help by providing leadership in its own role as employer – as we are doing with pay and employment equity – and by promoting women to leadership positions as we do with the help of our Nominations Service. But if we are to achieve real change then we need to address the barriers that stand in the way of men taking up a greater role in sharing parenting responsibilities from the time their children are born and women maintaining career paths while having children.

Conclusion
Our solutions may not be your solutions, because differences in culture and beliefs always influence what will be successful. However, I think there are some general lessons we have learned that are probably applicable in most countries, because we are all struggling with very similar issues.

The main lesson we have learned is that there is a need to strike a balance that recognises that choices are important and that there is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach that will suit all families.

And it is important to remember that unpaid work is highly valuable – both economically and socially. Caring, whether it is for children or aging relatives, (or both), has huge benefits to society and to the economy. Just because it’s hard to count, doesn’t mean it doesn’t count.

We must be careful not to create a double burden for women. Encouraging more women into the workforce is an easy way to increase the country’s productivity, but many of those women will burn-out if we still expect them to continue to undertake the lion’s share of unpaid work in the home and community.

I hope that I have been able to give you an impression of how New Zealand is approaching these challenging issues, which are vitally important for our medium- and long-term future.

I know Japan is grappling with the same issues and is, in some instances, coming up with different approaches. I am interested in learning more about what you are doing in areas such as pay equity and work-life balance, because as I said at the outset, it is important we share our experiences so that we learn from each other. I look forward to doing that, and I thank you for giving me the opportunity to share my thoughts with you today.

I would like to end with a quote from one of my role-models, the late Sonja Davies, a famous New Zealand trade union leader and member of Parliament: “Nothing is ever too difficult to achieve. Only inertia can defeat us.”