Investigators' Blog
Sexism and the gender pay gap – data that can’t be ignored
A recent study by researchers at Motu Economic and Public Policy Research provides strong, definitive evidence that sexism is mostly to blame for the gender pay gap in New Zealand.
The study found that, on average, women in New Zealand’s workforce are paid 84 cents for every $1.00 a man earns, despite there being no statistically significant difference in productivity levels between male and female employees.
“This study is different to most previous wage gap studies in that it tests whether men and women are paid different wages for adding the same amount of value to their employer,” said lead researcher Dr Isabelle Sin, Fellow at Motu and Principal Investigator at Te Pūnaha Matatini.
Motu study dispels some common arguments
Lead study researcher Dr Isabelle Sin, Fellow, Motu Economic and Public Policy Research and Principal Investigator, Te Pūnaha Matatini.
The researchers analysed New Zealand tax data for 50 per cent of the working population from 2001 to 2011, to determine how much of the overall difference between women and men’s pay could be attributed to women being employed in industries that pay less.
“We found that women were over-represented in low-paying industries like food and beverage services, but this explains a mere 7 per cent of the entire gender wage gap,” Dr Sin said. “If you add in the fact that women also tend to work in low-paying firms, we can say that 12 per cent of the overall gender wage gap is due to the particular industries and firms where women work.”
The study then looked at productivity and wages of New Zealand men and women in private, for-profit organisations with five or more employees. Using employee-level data linked to business information, they found that on average, Kiwi women are paid 16 per cent less than their male counterparts for making a contribution of the same value to their employer.
Overall, the data suggest that sexism is a drag on large segments of New Zealand’s economy, with the gender wage-productivity gap as high as 40 per cent in some sectors – in finance and insurance, telecommunications, transport equipment manufacturing, water and air transport, and electricity, gas and water, and rail.
“It’s worth noting that these are all sectors that have the potential for monopoly-created profits and have low competition,” said Dr Sin. “To put it simply, our research suggests sexism is likely to be a major driver of the gender wage gap. What we’re going to do about it is another matter.”
NEW paper: women & men add same value to their firms, but average woman paid only 84 cents for every $1 for average man. pic.twitter.com/chAMk1fAXd
— Motu Research (@moturesearch) August 28, 2017
Quality of the data make findings difficult to ignore
Professor Tava Olsen, Deputy Director – Industry and Stakeholder Engagement at Te Pūnaha Matatini.
Professor Tava Olsen from the University of Auckland, Director at the New Zealand Centre for Supply Chain Management and Deputy Director, Industry and Stakeholder Engagement at Te Pūnaha Matatini, described the results as “pretty definitive”.
“There is a gap and [because the study researchers] were able to get firm-level data on productivity, there’s really no explanation for it other than implicit bias or sexism,” said Professor Olsen.
The Motu research is a lot harder to ignore than previous studies due to its sheer size and the nature or quality of the data collected, she added.
“It’s not until you get a really big study like this that you can say ‘Oh yes, there is actually a problem here.’ Obviously, this isn’t the first study to show gender pay gaps, it’s just a very clean one in terms the data they got access to,” she said. “I doubt there are many countries who allow researchers access to their tax data… If you think about it, it’s pretty phenomenal.
“So I think this is quite important research in terms of showing there is a real gap. There is a problem here and it’s not really okay,” said Professor Olsen.
“Hopefully, companies will start putting procedures in place to check themselves and try and start looking at their own gender gaps.”
Te Pūnaha Matatini supporting NZ science journalism
Te Pūnaha Matatini is a major contributor to the Aotearoa-New Zealand Science Journalism Fund, which recently awarded $20,000 in funding to several New Zealand science journalists to cover stories ranging from genomics to driverless vehicles to climate change.
This first round of funding received 20 applications, with six projects involving journalists from a variety of media outlets across the country being selected.
“Overall, we were extremely impressed with the range and quality of the applications – from established science journalists to relative newcomers, from a range of media and from around the country,” said the fund’s founder Dr Rebecca Priestley.
We’re delighted to announce first round of funding! We had 20 applications and have funded 6 projects https://t.co/ANuD79A5Id 1/8
— NZ Sci Journalism (@scijournofund) August 20, 2017
Controversial technologies to be covered
Within the fund’s category on ‘Controversial technologies: Should we even go there?’ Te Pūnaha Matatini is funding three projects to a total of $10,000, as follows:
- $4,500 to Naomi Arnold (New Zealand Geographic article)
- $4,000 to Simon Morton (RNZ’s This Way Up feature)
- $1,500 to William Ray (RNZ’s Our Changing World series)
All of the projects are expected to be published by the end of 2017, after which they will be available under Creative Commons licence. Science journalists from around New Zealand will then have a second opportunity to apply for funding through the Aotearoa-New Zealand Science Journalism Fund in early 2018.
“Round one showed that journalists want to work on important science-related stories and that there is appetite to fund them doing so,” said Dr Priestley. “We are looking forward to seeing these projects come to fruition and to working on securing funding for round two.”
How to support the Aotearoa-New Zealand Science Journalism Fund
Interested readers and organisations wishing to support the fund can do so by emailing Dr Rebecca Priestley at sciencejournalismfund@gmail.com or through the Aotearoa-New Zealand Science Journalism Fund Press Patron crowd-funding page.
Dr Rebecca Priestley wins Prime Minister’s Prize – fourth for Te Pūnaha Matatini
Te Pūnaha Matatini investigator Dr Rebecca Priestley has been announced as the winner of the 2016 Prime Minister’s Science Communication Prize.
Dr Priestley is a senior lecturer at Victoria University of Wellington in the Science in Society Group. She has been an Associate Investigator in Te Pūnaha Matatini since the Centre was established in 2015.
Te Pūnaha Matatini is one of ten national Centres of Research Excellence. Its research focuses on the science of complex systems and networks, and applies this to study problems in society, the environment, and the economy. Dr Priestley co-leads a project in the Centre that studies public engagement by researchers.
“Dr Priestley is unique amongst New Zealand’s science communicators”, says Prof Shaun Hendy, Director of Te Pūnaha Matatini. “She is not only an accomplished science writer and journalist, she also has academic standing as one of New Zealand’s leading historians of science and has undertaken pioneering work in the study of science’s engagement with society.”
She received the $100,000 prize from the Prime Minister at an event in Wellington today, joining Te Pūnaha Matatini’s Dr Michelle Dickinson, Dr Siouxsie Wiles and Prof Hendy, as previous winners of the prize.
“We’ve placed public engagement and communication of our research at the heart of our mission” added Hendy, “and so it should be no surprise that Te Pūnaha Matatini has become the meeting place for New Zealand’s leading science communicators.”
Some of Dr Priestley’s prize money will be used to establish New Zealand’s first fund to support science journalism. Te Pūnaha Matatini will also contribute to this fund.
“As newsrooms shrink, it is getting harder for the media to cover science,” says Hendy. “For science engagement to work well, journalists need to be able to take the time to cover science stories critically. We hope this fund will help sustain independent science journalism in New Zealand.”
Contact: Dr Rebecca Priestley (Rebecca.priestley@vuw.ac.nz 021 917050); Prof Shaun Hendy (shaun.hendy@auckland.ac.nz 021 1442349)
Taking a stand for science and society
The world has taken a horrible turn for the worse in the last few weeks. Following a rather bizarre inauguration weekend that featured a running dispute over the size of Trump’s crowd and then the inspiring Women’s March, the Trump Administration unsettled the world with a flurry of controversial orders, some likely illegal and most certainly immoral. I did not expect to see things go this wrong, this fast.
The travel bans were probably the most frightening in intent, blocking people from travelling to the US on the basis of their place of birth, including existing legal residents as well refugees who were on the verge of making a new start. The orders themselves were drafted to avoid the overt racism and hostility towards Muslim society that characterised the Trump campaign, but failed in this by their construction on the flimsiest of pretexts. It was a dog-whistle that everybody could hear.
The impact on many people, including those fleeing wars in Syria and Yemen, was immediate. Around the world students, refugees, and others in vulnerable circumstances were turned away or detained at airports, separated from their families, or saw their hopes for escaping deadly conflict destroyed.
Te Pūnaha Matatini is the meeting place of many faces, and amongst our diverse community are friends and colleagues who have been directly affected by this ban. Just as we would not tolerate a researcher who refused to work with people on the basis of their place of birth, their gender, or their religious beliefs, we also have no tolerance for politicians who craft policies that use this as a basis to single out vulnerable people for harm.
What can we do? At Te Pūnaha Matatini HQ we’ve been writing to people in positions of power to urge them to take a stand. If you’d like to know how we’ve been going about this, then drop us a line.
We will also be supporting the March for Science, which will take place on Earth Day, April 22. The focal point for the March will be Washington DC, but there will also be marches in cities in New Zealand. You can follow @ScienceMarch_NZ on twitter if you would like to join in here in New Zealand.
This march is not just for scientists. The Trump administration has already sent strong signals that it is willing to hinder the science community’s ability to speak to the public and it is highly likely that cuts to science funding will follow. Climate change and the degradation of the environment will affect everyone, however, and it is the already marginalised who stand to lose the most. And none of the crises that society faces today are solvable unless we also address social injustice.
I’ve seen and heard comments that politics has no place in science, but these remind me of what I heard when New Zealanders marched against the Springbok Tour in 1981. One must acknowledge that science flourishes under some political arrangements, while it fails under others. When politicians abandon tolerant discourse, respect for others, and dismiss the value of evidence, science is in trouble. Whose job is it then to ensure the public understands this, if not the science community?
I’ve also seen pleas from some scientists to be left alone in their labs to get on with their science; some high profile scientists have argued that by addressing intersectionality, the march organisers are also attempting to put politics into science. We know that in science itself there are inequities and power structures that prevent or make it harder for some groups of people to become scientists in the first place. Only the most privileged in our society have labs in which to hide. There is no equivalence between the politics of Trump that seeks to exclude, and the efforts of many scientists to make science accessible to everyone.
Shaun Hendy is Director of Te Pūnaha Matatini. In 2016 he authored the book Silencing Science which explores the public obligations of scientists and instances where scientists have been prevented from speaking out.
Scholarship established following “Hidden Figures” gala screening
A fundraising campaign and gala screening of the critically acclaimed film Hidden Figures has raised $13,500 to help establish a scholarship for women to study physical sciences, maths or engineering in 2018.
Te Pūnaha Matatini’s Executive Manager Kate Hannah, Deputy Director Dr Siouxsie Wiles and University of Auckland Associate Professor Nicola Gaston from the Department of Physics organised the fundraising campaign to raise the profile of Māori and Pacific female scientists and students.
Listen to an interview with Kate Hannah on Radio Zealand’s Morning Report:
In addition to funds raised through the Givealittle campaign, five New Zealand Centres of Research Excellence provided financial contributions toward the scholarship: Te Pūnaha Matatini, the Dodd-Walls Centre for Photonic and Quantum Technologies, the MacDiarmid Institute for Advanced Materials and Technology, the Maurice Wilkins Centre, and Brain Research New Zealand. The University of Auckland Department of Physics also contributed.
The scholarship will be administered by the Association for Women in the Sciences (AWIS).
20th Century Fox, EVENT Cinemas, SOHO Wines and L’Oreal New Zealand provided valued assistance and promotional material for the gala screening of Hidden Figures.
Donate to an ongoing scholarship fund to support women in New Zealand science.
Read more:
- Scientists raise $13k for women to study – Radio New Zealand
- Q+A: NZ science’s own ‘Hidden Figures’ – New Zealand Herald
- Hidden Figures movie trailer – 20th Century Fox
- Te Pūnaha Matatini’s commitment to diversity, our sponsorship policy, and event code of conduct.
Analytics to improve health delivery systems
Te Pūnaha Matatini Associate Investigator Dr Michael O’Sullivan discusses analytics to improve health delivery systems.
Michael researches a combination of Operations Research and Analytics and is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Engineering Science and the Precise, and Timely Healthcare Theme Leader at the Precision Driven Health Research Partnership. The latter is a data science research initiative that features collaborations between the University of Auckland and partners in the public, corporate and healthcare sectors.
This presentation was recorded at an Orion Health Seminar on 6th December, 2016.
Maths Craft Festival
Enjoy craft? Then you probably enjoy mathematics too, you just may not know it. This was the idea behind the recent Maths Craft Festival, a weekend-long festival held at the Auckland Museum, celebrating the many links between mathematics and craft. The Festival was the creation of Jeanette McLeod (University of Canterbury/Te Pūnaha Matatini) and Julia Collins (University of Edinburgh), who were inspired to start the festival after a serendipitous encounter while Julia was on holiday in Christchurch. Jeanette and Julia – both avid knitters and crocheters – wanted to find a way to share the beautiful mathematics behind craft with the public. Jeanette pitched the idea to Te Pūnaha Matatini who responded with instant enthusiasm, and not only offered to be the major sponsor, but encouraged Jeanette and Julia to “think big”. With that, the idea of the Maths Craft Festival was born. A short time later, after being coerced into crocheting a hyperbolic plane, Phil Wilson (University of Canterbury) was recruited. Together the trio went on to create the first event of its kind in New Zealand.
The Festival combined eight hands-on craft stations with a series of public talks, and was immensely popular, even making an appearance on One News. Over 1,800 people visited the Festival, trying their hands at a range of mathematical crafts, including crocheting hyperbolic planes, building fractal sculptures, making Möbius strips and folding origami dodecahedrons. The public talks were given by mathematicians and crafters, and covered topics ranging from the mathematics of knitting, and the Four Colour Theorem, to fractals in art and nature, and chaos and the crocheted Lorenz Manifold. (In fact, Prof Hinke Osinga issued a challenge during her talk: be the first in NZ to crochet a Lorenz manifold and she will send you a bottle of champagne.) The Festival was the largest event run at the Museum in over six months, and was praised by staff for not only its popularity, but for attracting a such diverse group of people.
The Festival was an experiment, born of a desire to share the beauty of the mathematics in crafts, and it really hit a nerve. The positive feedback was overwhelming, with comments like “What a great event, our whole family has enjoyed it, from age 7-47!” and “Thank you for putting up such a cool event! Math is awesome.” Others thought that it was “Brilliant to see so many people old and young being enthused by mathematics. Let’s hope more of these events happen as there is clearly high demand for more maths related fun.” School teachers were inspired and “Have come away with some fabulous ideas to share with numerous teachers and their classrooms across Auckland. Looking forward to this becoming a regular event …. hint, hint.” In fact, the most common piece of feedback can be summed up by this comment: “Loved it, please repeat!”
What did people learn from attending the Festival? Aside from experiencing the “fascinating complexity and depth to all of the various constructions”, they were “amazed by how much breadth mathematics encompasses”, and have now come to realise that “Fractals are EVERYWHERE” and “Geometry is way cool.” And perhaps most heartening of all, that “Maths is exciting” and “maths can be fun!”
The Festival has proved to be so popular that Auckland Museum have asked for it to be run again next year – in their Events Centre, the copper dome on the roof of the museum with a 360-degree view over Auckland and space for 500 people. Plans are also underway to take Maths Craft on the road in 2017, and run events in other parts of New Zealand.
For more information on the Maths Craft Festival, or in case you’re yearning to fold an origami dodecahedron or crochet a hyperbolic plane, please visit mathscraftnz.org.
The Maths Craft Festival couldn’t have happened without the help and support of Shaun Hendy, Kate Hannah, Sarah Hikuroa, Danene Jones, Nicolette Rattenbury, Sarah Mark, Andrea Webley and the Auckland Museum, and our generous sponsors Te Pūnaha Matatini, the University of Canterbury, the University of Auckland, the New Zealand Mathematical Society, the Dodd-Walls Centre and Ashford.
InfectedNZ – Twitter Q+A
Did you miss our InfectedNZ campaign with Figure.NZ? Don’t worry – we’ve put together a collection of resources and Twitter Q+A to help answer your burning questions.
Resources
- InfectedNZ blogs
- Science Media Centre – Antimicrobial resistance – expert Q+A
- Science Learning Hub – teacher and student-orientated information about fighting infections, the immune system, and the work of some researchers.
- NZ Herald online“The big read: is the world on the brink of an antibiotic apocalypse?”
- The Spinoff “In the fight against the superbug apocalypse, don’t fall for the idea that infectious diseases only happen somewhere else.”
- Newshub. “Online campaign highlights dangers of infectious diseases.”
- Newshub. “Antibiotics will soon stop working, scientists warn.”
- NewstalkZB “Antibiotic resistance a growing threat to world health.”
- The Spinoff “Calling a vagina a vagina: why cutesy code words are terrible for our sexual health.”
- Waikato Times “Urgent action needed to combat killer infections.”
Twitter Q+A
Reception for Women in Mathematics and their Supporters at NZ Mathematics Colloquium
After the AGM for the New Zealand Mathematical Society on Monday 5th of December, there will be a reception for women in mathematics and their supporters. Everyone is welcome. The reception is sponsored by Te Pūnaha Matatini and will be chaired by Principal Investigator Dion O’Neale.
The event theme is: Being an ally: what we can all do to improve equity.
Abstract: Advocating for improved equity is a task that often falls to members of under-represented groups. This is problematic for a number of reasons; not least because it means that some of the voices that most need to be heard are least numerous and are, perhaps, undermined by perceptions of self-interest.
This event will begin with some background on what it means to be an ally, the benefits it can bring, and some of the potential pitfalls that can be associated with it. Over drinks, we will discuss the things that we can all do as individuals, both at work and at home, in order to improve equity in our departments and the New Zealand mathematical sciences community.
This event comes with a code of conduct: see http://nzmathsoc.org.nz/downloads/miscellaneous/CodeOfConduct-NZMC-WiM.pdf?t=1479095141.
SciGlow at Silo Park: the art of bioluminescent bacteria
Be wowed by the eerie glow of bioluminescent bacteria as art and science unite for SciGlow at Silo Park Auckland, 3-4 December.
Microbiologist Dr Siouxsie Wiles has teamed up with artists, schoolchildren and bioluminescent bugs to create the unique bacterial paintings in giant petri dishes. View intriguing artworks by professional artists or try your own hand at creating a living, glowing masterpiece.
Proudly sponsored by the Maurice Wilkins Centre for Molecular Biodiscovery, Te Pūnaha Matatini and the University of Auckland.
Dates: December 3-4
Time: 11am-6pm
Where: Silo Park, Auckland
Cost: Free