The above photo is a photo for "Equal Pay for Equal Work" against the assumption that males work should get paid more than women when they were nearly 50% of the labour force. This image from the CEPO highlights the advantages for both men and women of equal pay for women and men engaged in the same amount of work.
The graph opposite shows the steady amount of women into paid work from 1896 to 2000. The number of women in the labour market went from 169,000 to 382,000 between 1945 and 1971. This represents the increasing opportunities for women in the labour market, occupations such as nursing, teaching, shop and food work were done by women.
There are limitations to this data, Maori were not included in the graph until 1951, from 1945 individuals employed for less than 20 hours per week were not included, and from 1986 to 1996 those employed for less than 30 hours per week were not included.
The graph opposite shows the steady amount of women into paid work from 1896 to 2000. The number of women in the labour market went from 169,000 to 382,000 between 1945 and 1971. This represents the increasing opportunities for women in the labour market, occupations such as nursing, teaching, shop and food work were done by women.
There are limitations to this data, Maori were not included in the graph until 1951, from 1945 individuals employed for less than 20 hours per week were not included, and from 1986 to 1996 those employed for less than 30 hours per week were not included.
This cartoon states “Its an awful nice case, Mr Nash- but where’s the necklace?” “Ah! This is the first installment!”. The caption reads "A lower rate for the same or similar work is.....a threat for men workers....an injustice for women workers". This poster was produced at a time when the government began moving to equalise pay rates in the public service from 1961. The staged introduction of equal pay in the public service is satirised in this 1960 cartoon. Walter Nash, prime minister at the time, is shown on bended knee, offering women voters ‘an awful nice case’ with nothing in it. Finance Minister Arnold Nordmeyer keeps a beady eye on proceedings.
Women continued to be paid considerably less than men. The female minimum wage, for example, was 60% of the male minimum from 1945, increasing to 65% from 1949. In the mid-1950s, the most a man could earn in the insurance industry was £727 per year; the most a woman could earn was £450.
Equal Pay was a key issue for economic independence for the Women's Liberation. During World War Two women entered occupations which they were previously unable to enter due to their gender. Waged women increased in numbers from 180,000 in 1939 to a peak of 236,000 in 1943. This was still a standard participation rate compared to 38% in Britain. When the war ended women left their jobs. The war helped to bring women’s capitalized domestic service for New Zealand women; the demand was high. Almost 300,000 were working as domestic servants in 1936, this figure fell to 9,000 by 1945. Attempts to attract women into domestic work failed….young women with opportunities elsewhere showed a reluctance to settle for domestic work. Women seized the opportunity to do other jobs apart from domestic work. The war also gave women the opportunity to enter new occupations in older occupations. Women who had jobs as mechanics, truck drivers, servicewomen and tram drivers were eased out of work in favour of the returned soliders. However women in banks and government services kept their jobs securing a place in the public service due to the high labour demand. In 1945, a quarter of the female clerks and administrators employed by the civil service were married. The workforce participation rate of married women more than doubled from 1936 to 1945 to 3.7% to 7.7%. The participation rate doubled again, to 16% in 1961 to a further 26% in 1971. This represents the high turnover of married women moving in and out of waged work.
The years from 1970 to 1985 shifted perspectives of work for women with children. Women continued to work in the home, but the focus of work shifted towards paid employment. Younger New Zealand women were turning around the priorities of the older women whose paid work had been hidden behind their real work of family and home; now, home responsibilities were being hidden behind workforce participation. The increasing number of women with children in the workforce had far-reaching implications for the organisation of family life. In the early post-war years, the male bread-winner’s role had been sacrosanct, and women worked to uphold and support it. By the 1980s, this support had changed and women did not go to such lengths to give the appearance of being a wife and mother at home. While a breadwinner’s wage might still be the mainstay of a family’s income, it was accepted that it needed extra support. Paid work also reinforced women’s independence and self-sufficiency, but as the possibilities for women increased, there was a corresponding flight by men from providing the economic security for women and children. And in the workforce itself, the old divisions between men’s work and women’s work remained strong, although there was some penetration by women into male strongholds. It was, however, mainly educated women who were able to reach some kind of equality with men, albeit one that they saw as tenuous and which placed them at the lower end of the promotion and wage scale.
The percentage of married women in the workforce had been rising steadily since the end of the Second World War. In 1945 only 7.7 per cent of married women were in the workforce, but between the 1971 and 1986 Census alone, this increased from 26.1 per cent to 35.8 per cent. Furthermore, it was apparent that increasing numbers of women were working while they had young children. This was reflected in the meaning of women’s paid work. The case studies of the early post-war years showed that quite a few of the women worked primarily or solely because they needed the money and that this was, in fact, not unusual. Economic necessity of course remained a cogent reason for pursuing paid employment, but during the 1970s and 1980s a new concept of work was also gaining acceptability – to work for one’s own well-being rather than to assist the family or the nation in difficult circumstances. This new view of work for women was imbued with the ideals of self-fulfilment and independence which were being more clearly articulated during g this period. Nevertheless, whether working for money or for their own well-being, women were inevitably using their earnings for the well-being of the family as a whole.
Alongside these transitions came an increasingly vocal lobby from feminist women revealing discrimination in the workplace, and seeing more opportunities and rights for women. The argument was that unless women were free to work outside the home they would remain apart from the mainstream of social and political life. There was a tacit acknowledgement that marriage did not provide sufficient security and those women, even those with dependent children, should be entitled to seek their own economic security in the workplace. The Equal Pay Act (1972) broke new ground in legislating that workers receive equal pay for the same work, and the Human Rights Commission Act (1978) prohibited sexual discrimination in the workplace. Neither Act, however, could alter the fact that there was a women’s world and a men’s world in terms of occupation, status and wages in the workplace, and that the lack of support services in terms of domestic leave and childcare provision made it difficult for most women to manage the double load, and that women’s labour was used as a reserve labour force during times of demand and withdrawn during times of recession.
The relativity of the minimum wage to average wages has fluctuated widely over the years with extremes of 83 percent initially (in 1947) and 30 percent in 1984. The proportionality never fell below two thirds until 1957. It gradually fell to 44 percent in 1972 and was restored to almost two thirds in 1973 in line with a recommendation of the 1972 Royal Commission on Social Security. Adjustments under National from 1975 to 1984 were few and well below price increases and general wage increases. Thus in this period of high inflation, the ratio had fallen to 30 percent by 1984. The minimum was raised in three steps between 1985 and 1987 to reach 52.5 percent under Labour. Further slippage occurred under National from 1990 to 1999. Minimum wage rates have been raised more since 1999 under Labour led governments, as usual, but this has only partially restored relativities to a current rate of about 47 percent. Four recent increases took the level at April 2004 to $9 per hour, while youth rates for 16/17 year olds were substantially increased to $7.20, a relativity of 80% of the adult rate. Women pushed for economic equality to gain economic independence during the second wave of feminism. There was a lot of difference in jobs between men and women, in 1966 the median income for women was 51% of men’s. Women were demanding that the equal pay and equal job opportunity was introduced. Despite being estimated to cost $85 million to put Equal Pay in place, it was put into place in 1961. This ended the economic indifference between men and women; this was most noticeable in advertising where employers could not specify men in job posters at the time of the second wave of feminism.
The Second Wave of Feminism was a strong force in New Zealand economically for women. The biggest economic change of the second wave of feminism was legislative change; these had both short and long term consequences for New Zealand. In 1972, the Equal Pay Act was introduced over a period of the next five years to introduce equal pay for both men and women. The demand for labour, equal pay legislation and the demise of the family wage drove up women’s wages as a proportion of males wages- from 66.7% in 1961 to 78% in 1978. Women also began to make their way into traditionally male professions. The minorities were small such as 2% of women were lawyers in 1975. However there has been change between 1978 and 2000 women’s engagement with work continued to increase. Almost half of new lawyers in 1992 were female, compared with 2% in 1975. Among tertiary students graduating in 1998, female’s outnumbered males by 34,000 to 23,000 and their traditional orientation towards arts subjects had declined markedly. They outnumbered men in law, commerce, medicine, and were nearly equal in sciences. However certain tertiary degrees were still male orientated such as engineering, but 20% of all graduated in 1998 were female. With the economic downturn women’s participation increased. Women’s wages as a proportion of men’s increased only by 3% in 1978-1998 compared with over 20% in 1961-1978. Women were more likely to be found in low paid work and the work available was part-time. Full time women workers increased only from 34% to 39% of adult females in 1971 to 1996, while part time and full time work combined went from 38% to 58%. Between 1976 and 1986, the female unemployment rate was almost twice the male. Both rates increased thereafter but tend to converge, peaking in 1991, with male unemployment at 11% and female unemployment at 14.9%. This shows that women’s participation in full time work actually fell from the peak in 1986 and hadn’t recovered. In 1993 94% of New Zealand women felt that they had more freedom than their mothers, but while women had around three quarters of the waged work of men, they did twice as much housework and three times more child-care.
http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/video/26387/continuing-fight-for-equal-pay
This is a video from 1987 showing women in front of Parliament protesting about the lack of equal pay using songs.