Women can do anything…. if they're paid properly

Thursday, 27 January 2022

Then Dunedin National list MP Katherine Rich with her 9-week-old baby, Jonathan in the House. Pictured in 2001. She says: “I found it difficult to talk about the reality of how hard it was being away from my children: “People would say ‘oh that’s your choice’.”

It all looked so promising for Gen X women who were told, and believed, they could have the career and the baby. But, writes Sarah Catherall, four decades on fair pay arrangements are yet to catch up.

I was 14 years old when posters began to hang on the walls of my all-girls secondary school. “Girls can do anything,’’ the Government’s advertising slogans read. We saw images of young women with spanners under car bonnets and female plumbers in bathrooms.

It was the 1980s, a time when women began entering the workforce en masse, and females flooded into university lecture theatres in equal or greater numbers to men. Thanks to the hard work of second wave feminists in the 1970s, Gen X women were promised equality with men: equal jobs, equal pay and equal status.

From the mid-eighties, the rise of a neo-liberal and capitalist society meant that, for Gen-X women, success came to equal career goals and achievement. Women of my generation were told to strive for things, and our identities were often wrapped up in work. Unlike Baby Boomers, Gen X women have primarily been judged according to what they did away from the home.

Journalist Sarah Catherall and daughter Isabella, then aged 10 months. Catherall had just returned to work – but there had been no maternity pay at that time.

* Coronavirus: Countdown says it would be unfair to offer discounts

* There's a crisis brewing among Gen X women who are unhappy, overworked and unable to sleep

And many have worked or continue to work. According to the 2018 census, more mothers work in New Zealand now than ever before: two-thirds of mothers are in paid employment, including 45 per cent who hold down full-time jobs. Half of all women over 50 are in paid work. However, despite the ‘girls can do anything’ ethos, Gen X women now in their 40s and 50s are under-represented in senior roles and management positions.

Waikato University senior lecturer in social policy Dr Kate Prickett.

To make it worse, according to the Gender Equality survey, the gender pay gap worsens for this cohort. For women over 40, especially for professional women with a tertiary qualification, they earn 13 per cent less than men doing the same job (compared with a gender pay gap of 9 per cent on average), a rift which worsens as women age.

Along with the idea that Gen X women should have equal careers to men in an environment which hasn’t facilitated that, parenting has typically been far more demanding than it was for their mothers, according to Kate Prickett, director of the Roy McKenzie Family Studies Centre.

Sophie Waghorn, 4 months, visits Helen Clark for afternoon tea to hear the announcement on paid parental leave, in 2004.

Prickett, a demographer, says young adults are staying at home longer because they often can’t afford to move out, and because women are having children later (at an average age of 29), today’s mothers are parenting more intensely and for longer than a generation ago.

“The intensity of parenting has increased at the same time as you’re likely to be helping out your parents as they’re ageing, and they’re less likely to be able to help you in the way that grandparents did a generation ago,’’ says Prickett.

While Boomer mothers were forced into ‘choosing’ mothering versus a high-flying career (or postponing one) and experienced the residual losses from those choices, Prickett says “Gen X women were set up with a ‘girls can do anything’ ethos, so they felt like they were failing if they didn’t juggle careers and parenting at the same time.’’

When my eldest daughter was born in 2000, I took time off from a full-time journalism job but didn’t get any pay because paid parental leave wasn’t introduced until a year later. I remember how supported I felt three years later, when I got 12 weeks paid parental leave after my second daughter was born (which has since risen to 25 weeks paid leave).

That felt like a landmark, when the state was supporting me as a career mother. My second and third daughters were also eligible for 20 hours free early childcare education - ushered in, in 2007 - which was a blessing for working mothers like me.

Prime Minister Helen Clark talks to New Plymouth Girls High School pupils in 2008. Some years earlier her Labour government had launched the Action Plan for Working Mothers.

A lot finally happened in the early 2000s to help working mothers like me - in 2004, Helen Clark’s Labour Government launched the Action Plan for Working Mothers; four years later, we were legally allowed to ask for flexible working conditions.

Back in the 2000s, one of the women I interviewed was former National MP, Katherine Rich, who returned to Parliament with a newborn, when stories about her breastfeeding between Parliamentary sessions were unusual enough to make it to the front page.

Today, Rich is chief executive of the Food and Grocery Council, pushing the Commerce Commission to shake up supermarkets and end the duopoly.

Now 53, Rich was in Parliament for nine years, from 1999 to 2008. Her daughter, Georgia, was born after the 2002 election, and Rich resigned when John Key became the party leader, when she realised she wanted a regular 9-5 job rather than the relentless grind of politics.

Sue Kedgley outside Parliament in 1999. She joined Parliament when her son was 10.

“Looking back, the environment was incredibly difficult,’’ she says. “I took Georgia into the chamber and at that time she was considered a stranger in the House. I found it difficult to talk about the reality of how hard it was being away from my children. People would say ‘oh that’s your choice’.

“I remember trying to do everything and not feeling like I was doing anything properly. I started to feel that I wasn’t willing to pay the cost of six years of not being available. That’s why I left politics.’’

What irks Rich today is that so many of the women she studied commerce with in the late 1980s, who left Otago University “feeling like we were on the cusp of something exciting’’, fell away because they found the work culture too tough when they were trying to balance that with a family.

Sue Kedgley with two- week-old Bailey Zachary Kedgley-Foot, May 13, 1990.

“Slowly and surely, the career pipeline leaked, and it wasn’t long before women didn’t get promoted, or they worked in businesses which didn’t reflect their values. We were hit hard by the maternity penalty.”

Today, she has a mountain top view of appointments around her industry, and says, “So many times I’ve seen women not getting selected for roles they’re perfectly capable of. Or women not putting their names in the piles of CVs.’’

A few months ago, she was invited to a Foodstuffs expo. On the invitation list were about 100 CEOs from the industry - the head of Griffins along with the CEO of Goodman Fielder. Says Rich: “I walked in and there was not one female CEO in the room. It struck me. It was a milestone moment. It made me wake up and think: ‘Progress isn’t as great as I thought it was’.’’

Christchurch Girls' High students attempted to lead a protest highlighting LGBTQIA+ rights, feminism and sexual harassment at a neighbouring boys' school earlier this year, but were turned back. (Video first published March 2021)

It was thanks to 1970s feminists like Sue Kedgley that Gen X women had many of the opportunities their Boomer mothers were denied. Born in 1948 and raised by a full-time mother, Kedgley didn’t know any independent working women, so had no role models.

Instead, she says that women were expected to marry and be “domestic servants’’ to their husbands, with career choices limited to being teachers, secretaries or nurses. Until the 1970s, the tax system penalised second earners in a household, so it wasn’t financially advantageous for mothers to also work.

In her 2021 book, her seventh, Fifty Years a Feminist, she writes about her five decades of feminism and activism. The 73-year-old describes that time of pioneering and demanding rights for women in the workplace as tough, when she was always fighting for or against something. “Your generation take equality for granted. Overt discrimination is illegal now,’’ she says, sipping her coffee.

Kedgley became a Green MP when her son was 10 but was only able to juggle her work and domestic roles because her husband, lawyer Denis Foote, stepped in. “But that was unusual, especially among my generation.’’

Kaisa Wilson, expert on the gender pay gap.

That’s one of the things that still irks Kedgley. In her first book published in 1973, feminists envisaged that as women went into the workplace they predicted - and expected - that men would share an equal load at home. She frowns that this vision has failed to be realised - a point backed up by plenty of research.

Says Kedgley: “Here it’s seen as emasculating for men to take time out and have shared parenting. If one sex changes and the other doesn’t, you’ve got these problems.’

“It’s somehow women’s role to do the unpaid domestic work looking after children. It takes an incredible amount of mental energy. The guy will help out, but it’s not shared equally. So women are taking on demanding roles in the workforce which traditionally a man took on, but he had a full-time wife at home looking after the home front.’’

So looking forward, what is it like for Millennial and Gen Z working women today, and what can they learn from the experiences of my generation? As Rich points out, in many industries, New Zealand suffers a gender bias, one that has been called “the motherhood penalty’’. It is particularly acute in professions like law. Despite an even split of male and female lawyers in law firms, a NZ Bar Association report found there are four male QCs to every one female QC in our top courts.

Elsewhere, female directors only make up 31 per cent of NZX 50 company boards but the proportion of those on boards outside the NZX50 has dropped from 16.9 per cent in 2019 to 15.9 per cent in 2020, according to a report by the NZX.

Wendyl Nissen was the editor of Woman's Day.

The gender pay gap - which averages 9 per cent but worsens once women turn 40 - is starting to be tackled by corporates like Westpac, but it takes transparency and work. Meanwhile, there are active campaigns to redress the boards stacked with men and the glassed offices filled with male CEOs.

A campaign, Champions for Change, run by Diversity New Zealand, is encouraging corporates and large businesses to actively recruit women to leadership roles and board positions. The report reveals that many of New Zealand’s banks, corporates, and organisations are weighted in men’s favour: Bell Gully, the law firm, has a goal to lift its female partners to 25 per cent by 2025; Fonterra has just 18 per cent of women on its board, and just a third of its senior management roles are filled by women; only 22 per cent of Air New Zealand’s top managers are women, while New Zealand Rugby’s board is dominated by male directors (12 per cent are women).

The campaign’s goal is for a 40:40:20 (allowing for organisational needs) gender balance, and the 39 companies with 113,000 employees are to report their board and personnel charts each year and actively try to redress the imbalance.

Advocates like Dr Kaisa Wilson, an Auckland-based gender consultant and gender advisor for the World Bank, explains that the gender pay gap widens after women reach 40, in part because many mothers work flexibly or part-time to juggle their roles.

She argues that it will take legislative change to help women achieve gender equality in the workplace and points to Scandinavian countries as role models. She’d like men/or the other partner to be forced to take a portion of paid parental leave under what is called “a use it or lose it’’ scheme.

Author and former journalist Wendyl Nissen says she never mentioned children to her male colleagues.

“The answer is we fix the context. Caring for children and the elderly should be shared more equally between genders and better supported by the state.’’

The pay gap should be transparent and mandated, with companies and corporates forced to report it and to eliminate it. She also argues childcare should be free.

Wilson is a Gen Xer who has taken six months off from full-time work to be with her eight-year-old daughter while also working flexibly. She talks of younger mothers who are juggling jobs and their domestic roles, who are worn out.

Then there are the full-time mothers who feel bad for not being seen as a productive member of society because they’re not in the paid workforce. One of her more radical ideas is for women’s non-paid work to be paid by the state so that work is recognised and supported.

Two of my daughters are now aged 21 and 18 and entering adulthood. If they choose to have children, they’ll be eligible for flexible work conditions and paid parental leave, and will hopefully be encouraged to talk about family life without fearing it will disadvantage their chances of moving up the career ladder.

While the workplace is more supportive of women juggling jobs and children than it was when I was a working mother, Wilson argues the “gender question’’ isn’t solved almost four decades since I was told “girls can do anything”.

“Research shows that women negotiate just as hard for salaries as men but they get turned down. It’s easier to say no to a woman. Younger women still live in a sexist, racist society. They still aren’t treated equally.’’

‘I defined myself by my career and that was a mistake’

When she returned to work in 1993 after the birth of her fourth child, Pearl, Wendyl Nissen never told her male executives that she had children. This was before pre-flexible working conditions and paid parental leave, when, in the 1990s, the cost of being a high-powered career woman was that Nissen ignored her mothering role when she was in the office.

At Woman’s Day, where she was editor, Nissen started swearing, so men would listen to her in meetings. “I never mentioned my children to any of the male execs I worked with. You tried to hide the fact because people might think, ‘Oh you’re not up to it.’ I never took time off for sickness or when the kids were sick.’’

Now living in Hokianga with her second husband, Paul Little, the 59-year-old writes books - including her successful memoir, My Mother and Me - and continues to work as a journalist.

Her 2007 book, Bitch and Famous, was revealing, as she shared her years as a successful journalist and women’s magazine editor, particularly about the work-home juggle and the toll it took on her mental health.

“So there I was expressing breast milk and storing it in the office fridge, rushing home to feed Pearl during the day and pretending that I was really very happy leaving my baby to my sister-in-law Niang, who became our nanny,’’ she wrote.

She also wrote about her nervous breakdowns. In her early days at Woman’s Day, “No-one talked about work-life balance. We were on uncharted territory. I had no life mentors. It was totally me. I was driving myself. I was burned out, real quick.

“I defined myself by my career and that was a mistake. Everything that I was about was my career. I didn’t define myself by being a good mother.’’

But Nissen has always been career-driven. When she started at the Auckland Star 40 years ago, she decided right then, aged 19, that she wanted to be an editor one day. When she fell pregnant at 24, she never dreamed that children would inhibit her goal.

“We were the first generation to really get the benefit of all that the feminists had fought for. We could work, we could have husbands and partners and mortgages, and it would have been pretty dismal not to take advantage of it. I had this drive to make the most of myself.

“I was trying to honour the feminists and being bloody-minded and being good at doing it.’’

Nissen chose two husbands - a cartoonist, and then Little - who were equals, who both worked from home and shared the domestic and childcare duties. She helped pay the mortgage, while they respectively cooked, changed nappies and picked the children up from school.

But she had working friends who did a whole day’s work in high-powered jobs and went home and did a second job as they cooked, cleaned and ran around after their kids.

“It was very unusual in 1986 to have a husband who pulled his weight. I just demanded it.’’

Asked about the pressures on Gen X women, she says: “Having it all and doing everything, that’s a pressure.’’

“We women are also very judgy of each other. Women of other generations didn’t have that because back then women all did the same thing. I’ve felt that judgement right through my life and that’s something I see other women experiencing.’’