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The reasons for gender inequality in NZ incomes are complex, but they don’t excuse or explain it.
And it’s not going to change if we keep making excuses.
Income is about more than the gender pay gap, because when we talk about weekly income, Pākehā men in NZ earn nearly twice as much as NZ women.
Bar graph showing the median weekly income from all sources collected in the Stats NZ Household Labour Force Survey 2018 is $920 for Pākehā men compared to $504 for Pākehā women, $493 for Māori women, $462 for Asian women and $450 for Pacifica women.
Picture of a boy and a girl with the text: when should she learn that she’s worth less than him?
The reasons for income inequality are complex, but they do not excuse the inequality.
Women and men work the same number of hours each day. Women get paid for 35% of their work. Men get paid for 63% of theirs. (Stats NZ, Time Use Survey 2009/10.)
Nor do they explain it.
80% of the gender pay gap is unexplained.
“The research finds that traditional drivers such as type of work, family responsibilities, education, and age no longer explain the majority of the gender pay gap.” Empirical evidence of the gender pay gap in New Zealand, Gail Pacheco, Chao Li, Bill Cochrane, Ministry for Women, 2017.
Over the coming months, the Gender Dashboard will help NZers to better understand how inequalities place huge barriers on the achievement of economic independence for all genders.
Because we’re not going to change it if we keep making excuses.
Data sources and calculations
This work is based on/includes Stats NZ’s data which are licensed by Stats NZ for reuse under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence.
See also How can I use the data stories?
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Data sourced from: Stats NZ
Dataset name: Household Labour Force Survey
url: http://nzdotstat.stats.govt.nz/wbos/Index.aspx
Incomes > Incomes tables > Income by sex, region, ethnic groups and income source
Calculation:
Median weekly income from All sources collected for each ethnic group and gender for 2018 (Total Regions) / Median weekly income from All sources collected for European Males for 2018 (Total Regions)
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Data sourced from: Stats NZ
Dataset name: Time use survey 2009/10
url: http://archive.stats.govt.nz/
Browse for stats > Peoples and communities – Time use > Data – Time Use Survey: 2009/10 tables > Downloads Time Use Survey: 2009/10 – tables 1–7 > Table 3.2
Calculation: Contracted time – labour force activity / Total productive activities
(For Total males aged 12+ and Total females aged 12+)
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Data sourced from: Gail Pacheco, Chao Li, Bill Cochrane, Empirical evidence of the gender pay gap in New Zealand, Ministry for Women, 2017, page 4.