How Kiwi workplaces let down women

Photo / 123RF

Though New Zealand leads the charge internationally in regards to liveability, lack of corruption and sexy accents, a real key metric of a successful country has recently been released by the World Bank, showing us in a very poor light.

The Women, Business and the Law 2019: A Decade of Reform report measured gender discrimination in 187 countries.

It provided new insight into how women's employment and entrepreneurship choices are affected by legal gender discrimination. Placing us 35th, alongside such bastions of freedom and equality as Albania and Slovenia (and behind countries such as Kosovo, Mauritius, Paraguay, Serbia and Spain), we have a lot to do to close the gap.

Even Australia beat us by almost 20 places, ranking 16th in the world.

Examining 10 years of women, business and law data, the index assessed eight indicators including freedom of movement, starting work, pay equality, marriage, having children and running a business.

According to the study, the best places to live and work for a woman are in Belgium, Denmark, France, Latvia, Luxembourg or Sweden. The worst places are (from the bottom) Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Sudan.

What went wrong?

New Zealand fell behind in a number of key areas including pay, having children, and getting a pension, giving us a final WBL score of 91.25.

In the specific area of "Getting Paid" (defined as laws and regulations affecting women's pay), we ranked behind countries such as the Philippines, Uganda, Libya, Equatorial Guinea, Croatia and Brunei.

Even Togo scored better than us on this metric.

Getting better internationally (on average)

On a positive note, research found the global average score had risen from 70 to 75 from 10 years ago when measuring the key metrics first started. South Asia had the biggest improvement in average regional score, while countries in the Middle East and North Africa made the least progress.

Lack of freedom

Sadly the report highlights that 2.7 billion women are legally restricted from having the same choice of jobs as men, and more than one-third of economies still restrict women's agency and freedom of movement. As well, 104 economies prevent women from working in certain jobs, 59 have no laws on sexual harassment in the workplace and in 18 economies husbands can legally prevent their wives from working.

C'mon Kiwis!

Considering we were the first country in the world to give women the vote, I hope that this report gives our Government and private businesses fresh enthusiasm to ensure that we as a country not only value equality in principle, but put in place tangible steps to seek out equality in our laws and public practice for all our people.

- Contact Tom O'Neil and the team at CV.CO.NZ for a free CV or LinkedIn assessment or to be your personal career coach. Visit www.CV.CO.NZ or www.CareerCoach.nz to find out more.