Tania Domett looks at the barriers to women’s participation in the workforce and how changing the underlying framework causing inequities are key to better outcomes. 

Cogo and Project Gender have delivered a number of research projects over the past couple of years that have – in one way or another - gathered data on what women need to be able to access paid work, and experience pay and employment equity.

These projects have included insights on how to get more women into the building, construction and infrastructure industries; what employers can do to improve mental health and wellbeing and reduce corporate burnout; DEI in large corporates, measuring demographic diversity and levels of inclusion across the workplace; and how single parents need the system to change to better support them and their children.

We have heard from literally thousands of women, wāhine, trans, intersex and non-binary people across diverse communities, industries, work settings and income levels. We’ve heard from women who want to be in paid work, who want to access more hours of paid work, who want to get ahead at work and get promoted, and from women who want to experience more fairness and better wellbeing at work.

Those women reporting the most significant barriers to accessing paid work and getting promoted are, without exception, mothers and caregivers, and our research found that the following are the main barriers across the board.

When it comes to women wanting to be able to do any paid work at all or wanting to do more hours of paid work than they are currently doing, being able to access childcare that’s affordable, located nearby, and has session-times that line up with hours of work is critical.

Tying in with this, being able to work set scheduled hours or flexible hours that fit around children and caregiving is also important.

When it comes to women being able to advance their careers, again it is how work is scheduled and being able to access childcare that are key factors, but this time let’s add when meetings are scheduled.

For example, a woman in a senior corporate role talked about the challenges of making early morning meetings: “What I have to get through in the morning to get my kids off to school… I’ve been up for hours and driven across half the city and then am expected to get into work for an 8:30am meeting and walk through those doors, gliding in like a swan.”

Employers also need to think about part-time workers and the impact organising last-minute meetings out of their scheduled work hours. They also need to think about making sure that meetings end when they are scheduled to, so as not to jeopardise school pick-up time.

Employers need to think about when social out-of-work events occur that “aren’t-work-but-really-are”. These social events are where the crucial team bonding happens, but some of your staff may not be able to afford $100 on a babysitter, and others may not work on Thursdays when everyone goes to the pub at 5pm.

Part-time and flexible workers – who are mostly women - often experience exclusion. When everyone on the team is supposed to pull together and do their part at “crunch time” on a needlessly-tight deadline, the “real heroes” pull the extra hours. But your part-time workers may have already stretched their hours for that week. “Crunch time” could, in fact, be seen as a sign of systems failing, rather than a way of identifying who can show a commitment to the cause and who deserves promoting. Employers need to think about how they structure work and set deadlines as well.

There is a vast population of women in Aotearoa who want to be in work but currently are not. And there is a vast population of women who want to be promoted into leadership roles and advance their career but are hampered by the refusal of many – actually most – employers to see that leadership roles can be structured so that they can be done part-time.

What is the key factor across all these themes? It is caregiving. Women do the lion’s share of it, and it is this normative responsibility for caregiving that is most impacting women’s equitable access to and participation in paid work and all the benefits that flow on from that.

Women incur a serious financial hit over the course of their lifetime, earning on average $880,000 less than men. And that figure is greater for wāhine Māori, Pasifika women and disabled women who can add racism and ableism to the structural discrimination that they face.

Gendered social norms, with workplaces as key institutions reinforcing those norms, mean that being a working dad tends not to be the same as being a working mum. Our research shows that men in the workplace report having dependants as often as women – if not more often. However, when it comes to the impact of having dependants on career progress, remuneration, and how they operate in the world of work, it is not the same for men who are fathers as it is for women who are mothers.

In research carried out by Cogo, men were far less likely than women to say that they have to hide the fact that they have dependants in order to be accepted at work. Men are far less likely to take part-time roles. Men are far more likely to be in leadership roles. Men are far more likely to be paid more.

There was a campaign quite a few years ago now, with the key message “Flexible Working is not the F Word” which did a great job at helping to normalise flexible working practices for parents. But who accesses flexible working the most in the workplace? It is mothers.

Flexible working, school-hour shifts, and part-time work absolutely give some women better access to paid work, but they will not shift the dial on gender equity. These workplace policies are generally promoted as gender-neutral and available to everybody. But in practice, not unlike subsidised childcare, they are seen as something that will help women work because of their caregiving responsibilities. And the trade-off is often less remuneration and fewer promotion opportunities.

These workplace policies are the perfect example of what feminist economist Nancy Fraser calls affirmative remedies, which are those that correct inequitable social outcomes without addressing their underlying causes. They are Band-Aid remedies. They stand in contrast, she argues, to transformative remedies, which correct inequitable outcomes by restructuring the underlying generative framework that causes them.

We have serious gender and ethnic pay gaps in Aotearoa. We also have a serious gender caregiving gap, with career breaks, reduced hours, and part-time work being a feature mostly of women’s employment. The caregiving gap contributes to the gender pay gap, which in turn reinforces the caregiving gap by making it economically rational for the mother to be the parent who stays at home or works reduced hours. And on it goes.

Only by addressing the fundamental issue of the gender caregiving gap head-on have we got any hope of achieving pay and employment equity. This is the underlying generative framework that needs to be restructured.

What can employers do – what are the transformative remedies? We suggest that you focus your attention on your male employees and make them the target of your workplace equity initiatives. Start by devising ways to support more fathers to take up parental leave and flexible working. Monitor how many men are accessing parental leave and flexible working in your workplace - track your progress over time. This is how women need the workplace to change.

Tania Domett is the Founder and Director at research company Cogo, and Co-founder and Director at Project Gender. She is an experienced research leader skilled in designing, driving and executing complex research projects. 

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