Dellwyn Stuart: Persistent pay gaps show we need to make a promise for working women of the future

Gender pay gaps in the tech industry are having distressing consequences, Dellwyn Stuart says. Photo / Dean Purcell

OPINION:

I think many of us have come to understand how pay gaps came about.

Being the main breadwinner was the role of the man of the house, while the woman took on caregiver roles.

But that was then, and this is now. What is disturbing to me is not only have we not done enough to close the pay gaps, new industries have developed where the pay gap is even higher.

Yes, I’m talking about the tech industry.

While the industry goes back to early last century, the boom, or the dot-com bubble took place around the turn of the century, long after we started talking about pay gaps.

This relatively new industry has not just mirrored the pay gap of other industries, it has increased the gap. In the UK over 90 per cent of companies pay their male employees more than their female staff, putting the tech industry’s gender pay gap at 16 per cent, higher than the national average of 11.6 per cent.

And while there has been much work to encourage women into STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) roles, in the US only a quarter of tech employees are women.

The reasons are distressing. In the US, research shows many are leaving as they see no career advancement opportunities. A McKinsey 2021 Women in the Workplace report found that for every 100 men promoted to manager, only 86 women are promoted.

There has been a concern that Silicon Valley has established itself as an old boys’ club.

Here in New Zealand while the tech sector is still desperate for more staff, women only occupy 23 per cent of professional IT roles overall.

And the future doesn’t look much better, with less than one in twenty girls considering a high-paid career in science, technology, engineering or maths, compared to one in five boys.

So here we are, more than fifty years since the equal pay legislation, creating new industries that show bias.

One of the themes of International Women’s Day this week is “technology and innovation”, which is an ideal time to call on that industry to stop repeating the wrongs of other industries. It is good to see that companies such as Apple, Amazon, and Google have been proactively working to close the pay gap.

There are many ways to do that: ensuring women get an equal chance for promotion, providing more flexible working hours for staff with caregiving roles, creating female role models for younger women looking at entering the tech industry.

But we know accountability will also be a game changer and that’s why MindTheGap wants our government to change legislation to make pay gap reporting mandatory.

We know from the experience of individual businesses we work with that what gets measured gets addressed. Companies who look into the reason for their pay gaps often find that they really can do something about them.

Overall, tech industries are underrepresented amongst companies which have chosen to report on pay gaps in our MindTheGap registry.

We celebrate the reporting being done by Spark, Jade Software, Xero and Callaghan Innovation. They are good role models.

Reporting is just the beginning of a long journey to make sure that when all New Zealanders go to work, they are being paid fairly.

What we need to see is that as new industries emerge and evolve, the whole concept of pay gaps dissolve.

That’s a promise I’d like us to make on this year’s International Women’s Day for the working women of the future.

-Dellwyn Stuart is co-founder of the Mind The Gap campaign