The Future of Work and Gender Equality
Written by Lyn Brieseman on April 1, 2020.
This article was published on https://www.hcamag.com.Will technology enable future workplaces where there is no gender or any other form of pay gap or inequity in employment? If technology is replacing women’s jobs, does dealing with gender equity in the workplace matter now?
“would want to “smarten” its society by attempting to resolve the inequities that currently exist among humans…. We probably want to clean up our act before this happens – and we’ll be much happier if we do even if AI never appears.” (written in 2008!)[1]
The uneven impact is also seen in New Zealand. Recent analysis of the changing occupational mix in New Zealand[4] found that the New Zealand workscape changes are broadly similar to the US or Australia and that there has been pronounced growth and change in the mix of occupations within the 'community and personal services' occupation group and within 'clerical and administrative' occupations.
Recent analysis of our remuneration database[5] highlights that a key contributor to the overall gender pay gap is occupational and vertical segregation – i.e. where and at what level women are employed. The McKinsey report identified that healthcare and accommodation stand out as sectors where women could make significant employment gains relative to men, so occupational segregation may not be such a hospital pass for women after all. However, our data also shows that in New Zealand, while women make up 85% of the healthcare workforce, they are clustered in roles at the lower end of the pay scales in this sector (see graph below).
So while females are currently employed in sectors where job growth is predicted, gender inequity will not reduce if women remain in the lower paid roles with the result that the ongoing growth in the healthcare sector could magnify the pay gap. Addressing inequity now remains as important as ever.
Technology is affecting both the nature and mix of jobs and also affecting how and where we work. Organisations have been forced to consider totally different ways of working to deal with the automation and now digitisation/computerisation of many work functions. Many manufacturing and clerical roles have been completely re-framed.
Organisations also had to consider different ways of working as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. During the lockdown phases of the pandemic many people were required to work from home and widespread adoption of technology allowed many more of us to do so than would have been the case in the past. Working remotely, rather than having to travel to workplaces enabled employees to balance work and home responsibilities. Lack of the “normal” childcare options, such as school or kindergarten, required parents to manage work and home responsibilities in a different way and required their employers to allow them to do so.
The lack of flexible working options is one of the contributing factors to the gender pay gap and employment inequity, because it means that many employees, particularly women who have traditionally been the carers, have had to make trade-offs between their career and their caring responsibilities. As a result of the pandemic, new flexible working practices, such as working remotely and the flexibility that allowed, became more prevalent and more accepted. Our Pulse surveys, run during and after the lockdown, found that 70% of employers fast tracked flexibility and remote working practices and 60% developed new people initiatives or ways of working. This development has the potential to contribute significantly to improving gender equity in the workplace as organisations normalise the practice and therefore the concept of flexible working.
While underlying societal attitudes contribute significantly to gender inequity in the workplace, the pandemic showed that an organisation’s actions can have an impact on inequity.
Bigger questions around how society will deal with the impact of technology, such as a lack of paid work arising from technological advances, are beyond any one organisation’s scope of impact. This will require government policy measures with proposed solutions such as a universal basic income. The pandemic also required governmental intervention to reduce the negative and often inequitable impact on individuals and the economy. However, it is still in organisations’ interests to continue addressing inequity themselves within their sphere of influence, because the choices that organisations make in response to technology will have a significant influence on how technology will affect equity in future workplaces.
Much of the focus for addressing inequity has been on closing the gender pay gap and organisations have been tasked with dealing with this in New Zealand as elsewhere around the world. Closing the gender pay gap today will not solve the problem in the future, and just addressing pay inequities will not resolve gender inequity at work – the causes run much deeper than that. Nevertheless, addressing pay inequities is a good place to start because it forces organisations to focus on the broader employment issues that result in a pay gap.
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Remuneration: Ensuring that the pay levels for roles are related to the actual level of responsibility and skill required in the role, not what the market pays for similarly titled roles.
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Flexibility: Establishing a culture that enables flexibility regardless of status, including employment, marital, family, sexual orientation, age etc.
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Development: Ensuring that, regardless of part-time or full-time status, gender, ethnicity, age, all relevant development opportunities and reward options are available and accessible to all employees
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Mobility: Encouraging women into a broader range of occupations and to put themselves forward for development and promotion, to take full advantage of technology and the emerging occupations.
When and how the world emerges from the impact of the pandemic and which businesses will survive and in what form is still uncertain. As with the on-going impact of technology, organisations and employees will have to reinvent themselves, and how work evolves in the face of these challenges will have a significant impact on gender equity in the workplace.
As technology changes the face of work and the impact of the pandemic continues to affect how we work, organisations need to continue to address the issue of equity in employment and make sure that technology continues to contribute to equity rather than work against it.
[1] Discovering the Foundations of a Universal System of Ethics as a Road to Safe Artificial Intelligence. MR Waser
[2] Seasonally adjusted HLFS figures from StatsNZ, press release November 2020.
[3] The Future of Women at Work, McKinsey Global Institute, June 2019
[4] 2019 Occupational Drift in New Zealand 1976 – 2018, December 2019, D.C Maré, Motu Working Paper 19 -22 (https://www.motu.nz/our-research/population-and-labour/individual-and-group-outcomes/occupational-drift-in-new-zealand-1976-2018/)
[5] Pay Equity – Analysing the pay gap in New Zealand, Strategic Pay, 2020 (https://www.strategicpay.co.nz/site/strategicpay/files/pdfs/Strategic%20Pay%20Understanding%20Gender%20Pay%20Gap%202020.pdf )
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