Valuing Skills
| Published date | 01 April 2009 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0952076708100879 |
| Author | Anne Junor,Meg Smith,Ian Hampson |
| Date | 01 April 2009 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Valuing Skills
Helping Mainstream Gender Equity in the New Zealand
State Sector
Anne Junor
The University of New South Wales, Australia
Ian Hampson
The University of New South Wales, Australia
Meg Smith
The University of Western Sydney, Australia
Abstract The state sector has led slow progress towards pay and employment equity in
Anglophone countries. Horizontal and vertical job segregation have, however,
proved intractable barriers to closing the gap fully. An under-researched
element of the solution may involve examining whether skill levels are
accurately reflected in the low pay and flat career structures of occupations
and part-time jobs where women and ethnic minorities are concentrated. This
is a public policy issue, requiring that systemic reviews of pay and
employment equity include skill reassessments. It has so far been mainly a
public administration issue, because of the state sector’s vanguard role in
equity reviews. Against a backdrop of equality initiatives in the UK and other
Anglophone countries, we focus on the pay and employment equity review
process in Aotearoa-New Zealand between 2004 and 2008. Here a
mainstreaming approach has been adopted, ‘making gender equity ordinary’
by providing tools for reviews of pay and employment opportunity and for
remedies such as job re-evaluation. Our focus is on the potential contribution
to this agenda of skill reassessments. We outline the research-based
development of a toolkit to help classify the under-recognized social and
organizational skills required in jobs where women are concentrated, from
low-paid ‘support’ roles to policy advice. This skills taxonomy can also help
identify the progressive deepening of these skills through problem-solving
DOI: 10.1177/0952076708100879
Anne Junor, Deputy Director of Industrial Relations Research Centre, Level 5, Australian School of
Business, The University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia.
[email: a.junor@unsw.edu.au] 195
© The Author(s), 2009.
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0952-0767
200904 24(2) 195–211
practice – an identification that may assist in defining career pathways. We
conclude with an equity and business case for ‘mainstreaming’ its use.
Keywords gender mainstreaming, pay equity, public sector management, service work,
skill, wage discrimination
Introduction
Employment equity involves the intertwined factors of pay equity and equal
access to occupations, career paths, and quality part-time work. Equity extends
beyond equal treatment and absence of discrimination, to include meeting of
needs, recognition of rights, valuing of worth and respecting of diversity. It
involves identifying the unrecognized skill demands of jobs in which women,
including ethnic minority women, are concentrated. To help with such identifica-
tion, we outline the elements of a new research-derived approach to a fuller iden-
tification of these social and organizational skills.
Pay and employment equity are matters of public policy, shaped ultimately by
international treaty obligations. Anglophone governments have narrowed the
gender pay gap by outlawing direct discrimination and unequal treatment, but they
have trodden warily along the path to fully close this gap. We briefly survey some
history of public sector pay equity initiatives in several Anglophone countries,
sketch some recent equality initiatives, and canvass the promises and risks of
gender equity mainstreaming. Our main focus is on the elements of a five-year
public sector Plan of Action in Aotearoa-New Zealand (NZ), designed to ‘make
gender equity ordinary’. This public sector approach may turn out to exert indirect
market pressure on private employers to follow suit in enhancing skills recogni-
tion, career paths and quality part-time work.
Even where state sector agencies set out to remove gender pay differentials,
however, they face two problems. The first issue is to identify the basis of worth in
segregated occupations – the question of why, typically, ‘men working in plant
nurseries earn more than women working in child nurseries’ (Armstrong, 2007,
p. 24). Traditional definitions of skill, originally developed outside the service
sector, rely heavily on formal qualifications and capacity for specialized use of
technical tools. Jobs not requiring these qualifications and capabilities risk being
defined as low-skilled. The second issue is the absence of vertical career structures
in predominantly female occupations, where the gender wage gap widens with age
and labour market experience (Armstrong, 2007, pp. 14–15; Dex et al., 2008).
While career progression, too, is often skill-based, experience in many predomi-
nantly female jobs, such as caregiving, is not seen as resulting in enhanced skills.
Particularly in service jobs, social and organizational skills are often mis-named
‘soft skills’, or are seen as personal qualities derived from ‘maturity’. Even when
Public Policy and Administration 24(2)
196
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