Raraunga Ohumahi 2022 — Āputa utu Workforce Data 2022 — Pay gaps

Contributing to the decline in the gender pay gap is the record high female share of senior leaders, at 55.8%.

Analysis of the Workforce Data has generated the following insights:

• Pay gaps in general are lower when people in equivalent roles are being compared. For this reason, gender pay gaps tend to be lower for specific occupations than the overall gap. For example, the gender pay gap for senior leaders is 5.0% for 2022. This is lower than for all management roles (6.5%) and the Public Service as a whole (7.7%).
• Age groups under 40 years have gender pay gaps of under 5%. Gender pay gaps increase with age, starting from 1.5% for those aged 20 to 24 and rising to 11.4% for those aged 60 to 64.
• Gender pay gaps vary greatly among departments, ranging from 25.0% in the Ministry of Defence to -3.5% in Oranga Tamariki (a negative gender pay gap means women were paid more than men).
• Differences in the gender pay gap across departments are generally driven by the extent to which departments have gender imbalances in their workforces, and this is influenced a lot by whether they operate in traditionally male or female dominated sectors. For example, some traditionally male fields (such as IT or procurement) tend to be highly paid, whereas lower paid clerical and contact centre roles tend to be female dominated. This occupational segregation — women being more likely to be working in lower-paid occupations — is a key driver of the gender pay gap for many departments.
• There can be compositional differences between the genders in terms of seniority and experience within occupational groups as well, although there is evidence that these gaps are reducing. For example, women made up 58% of policy roles at the advisor level in the Public Service in 2012, versus 34% of principal advisor positions. This gap has narrowed substantially by 2022, with women making up 61% of roles at advisor level and 55% at principal advisor level.

The Public Service Commission has reported the Public Service gender pay gap using average (mean) pay since 2000. This differs to Stats NZ’s approach of using median pay when reporting the gender pay gap for the entire workforce. 

Measuring the gender pay gap — Stats NZ

Median pay is the middle amount of pay earned — half of employees earn less and half earn more. Median pay better reflects the pay a typical employee receives.

On the other hand, mean pay better reflects employees with very low or very high pay, and the fact that women are overrepresented in the low paid groups and underrepresented in high paid groups. The Public Service gender pay gap using mean pay is shown in the preceding section.

In 2022, the Public Service gender pay gap using median pay was 6.8%. This is up on the three previous years (it was 5.6% in 2021, 5.8% in 2020, and 6.2% in 2019) but still substantially below the 2018 figure of 10.7%. Although male pay increased more than female pay at the middle of the pay distribution in 2022, female pay increased more near the bottom and the top of the distribution.

The gender pay gap using median pay for the entire New Zealand workforce, as reported by Stats NZ, was 9.2% in 2022, almost unchanged from the 9.1% reported for 2021. The graph below shows:

• how the gender pay gap measured using median salaries has generally declined over time for both Public Service (down from 16.7% in 2000) and the overall New Zealand workforce (down from 14.0% in 2000)
• the gender pay gap for the overall New Zealand workforce has plateaued in the last few years
• that despite the latest increase, the Public Service gender pay gap remains substantially below the New Zealand workforce gender pay gap.