Logie JanEQUAL PAY AMENDMENT BILLFirst ReadingJAN LOGIE (Green): I move That the Equal Pay Amendment Bill be now read a first time. I nominate the Government and Administration Committee to consider the bill. This bill was developed by my colleague Catherine Delahunty. It was developed after a meeting we both attended sharing New Zealand research that showed an increasing gender pay imbalance for students in the first 5 years of graduating.When Catherine Delahunty launched this bill in 2011 some people said the difference in men's and women's pay was not a result of discrimination and that her bill—this bill—was unnecessary. Then the Employers and Manufacturers Association boss Alasdair Thompson made our case for us saying: Look at who takes the most sick leave. Women do in general. Why? Because once a month they have sick problems. Not all women but some do. They have children that they have to take time off to go home and take leave of. I don't like saying this because it sounds like I'm a sexist but it's a fact of life." This was great proof that bias and discrimination are alive and well at least in some parts of our business community.With this evidence and the overwhelming anger of many New Zealanders in June 2011 the Government said it would take a look at this bill. It then won the election in November and the rest—more accurately described I think as "subtle dismantling of rights"—is history.This bill will not deliver pay equality for women by itself but it is an important step forward rather than backwards in this struggle which has been fought for far too long. This bill provides transparency so that women can find out if they are being paid less than male colleagues for the same work. It provides a prompt for employers to consider whether there may be unconscious bias in their pay decisions. It will also provide much more accurate information for us to track the causes of the gender pay differential. In all reality and truth this is a very small bill and what it does is very simple. But nevertheless these simple interventions could be a game-changer for at least some women.This bill sits within the continuum of efforts for gender pay equality that started with the suffragettes. After women won suffrage in 1893 equal pay was next on their political agenda and that work is still continuing today. Women are still fighting 124 years later to get paid the same as their male colleagues. The Equal Pay Act 1972 and the Human Rights Act 1993 made it very clear that it is illegal in this country to discriminate on the basis of gender. We have a strong legal commitment to paying the job not the gender. And yet 45 years on from the Equal Pay Act women's average hourly earnings are still 13.6 percent less than men's and that is 22.9 percent for Māori women and 28.4 percent for Pasifika women.In the 1990s we did make some progress in righting that imbalance but since that time the inequality has become entrenched and that is not because we have reached the point that we cannot do anything more; it is because we have stopped doing anything much at all. The way the gender pay imbalance has been tracking it will take until at least 2062—2062—before women finally get equal pay. It is predicted that we will be able to colonise the moon by 2022. I have got to say I do not think that equal pay should be harder than colonising the moon. So enough already eh? I think it is time Parliament got proactive on this. This bill will not by itself fix the imbalance and achieve gender equality in Aotearoa. But we do know by now—thanks to Kristine Bartlett and the unions—that our Equal Pay Act can also be used to deliver equal pay for work of equal value a major contributor to the imbalance.This is the next obvious area for action: addressing conscious and unconscious bias. Research commissioned by the Ministry for Women and published this year found that traditionally understood factors such as education occupation industry or part-time work accounted for only 20 percent of the pay imbalance. Eighty percent of wage inequality is caused by differences in behaviour between men and women as well as either conscious or unconscious bias that negatively affects women's opportunities for recruitment and wage advancement.Other research analysing productivity and pay rates in private firms found that the difference in men's and women's pay cannot be justified. Recent Australian research counters the myth that women just need to learn to negotiate. It found that women are willing to negotiate for pay but it is just that men are more likely to get the pay increase at the end of the negotiation.Yes there are other factors to this problem but there is plenty of evidence of conscious or unconscious bias in employment pay offers and progression. It is not always the Alasdair Thompson - type sexism; it can also just be good people not having a prompt to reflect or second-guess their instinct. I have got an example from my own experience here within my team where a man with less experience was offered pay two grades higher than a woman with significantly more experience. We found this out only because we have a very close unionised team who share information. The people making the decision when challenged were upset that anyone would suggest they were biased but they dropped his pay offer to be equivalent to hers.They are good people. I know they were not intending to discriminate but the reality is that we are all affected by these biases. They exist in our society and they will come out in this situation. How much better would it be to have a system that prompted reflection ahead of time that built us that check in to our decision making? Discrimination is illegal but it is pretty hard to find out whether you are being paid less for doing the same job especially as it is quite normal for contracts to prohibit or discourage discussing pay and salaries. It should not be by accident that women find out they are being paid less. How can we stamp out discrimination when the only people who are able to identify it are those who are doing the discriminating?The Ministry for Women on its website tells employers to "Be transparent. Have clear targets measurements and reporting—this is critical to building an effective gender diversity plan." This is Government advice and that is what this bill does; it provides the simplest possible framework to achieve the Government's advice. A lot of companies are doing this and they are finding that it pays off in terms of lower turnover and happier staff. This has not overburdened their businesses; it has helped their businesses.This bill requires employers to add gender to the payroll data that they are already required to collect and to send it in to the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment once a year along with the particulars of all equal pay determinations. It enables employees to access the information in gender-aggregated form. I fail to see how that could be excessive. I hope that everyone in this House will put the interests of women first tonight to move us forward instead of backwards in this journey towards equal pay. Thank you."