Executive summary
At MSD we are continuing to focus on eliminating pay gaps and are making good progress. MSD’s overall gender pay gap for 2021 is 9.9% compared to the national public service gender pay gap of 9.6% (Human Resource Capability data as at 30 June 2020 [2]). MSD’s gender pay gap has steadily reduced from 15.1% in June 2018.
MSD has been actively addressing the gender pay gap with annual Gender Pay Gap Action Plans aligned to the Public Service Action Plan, a Government directive articulating a set of actions and milestones designed to eliminate the gender pay gap across the Public Service. We do not have any pay gaps within same or similar roles or across the majority of our pay bands. Service Delivery in particular shows no pay gaps.
During 2020, we also began investigating ethnic pay gaps at MSD. We found that we have ethnic pay gaps for Māori, Pacific and Asian employees of 4.5 percent, 12.1 percent and 9.1 percent respectively, when compared to non-Māori, non-Pacific and non-Asian employees. These are further pronounced for women within each ethnic group. This year, for the first time, we have also been able to investigate the gender diverse pay gap.
Our analysis shows MSD’s gender, ethnic, and ethnic-gender pay gaps are the result of women and employees identifying as Māori, Pacific or Asian being more represented in lower paid roles and less represented in higher paid roles, as well as clustered within occupation groups that are lower paid. Ministry-wide there is evidence of a gender diverse pay gap but we are currently unable to investigate what is driving the pay gap as the number of gender diverse employees is too low for further analysis.
Our focus has been on increasing pay to our lower paid employees through role reviews, living wage adjustments and a new pay and progression approach all of which have contributed to the significant reduction in our pay gaps since 2018. We also continue to focus our efforts on activities that will have longer term impacts, especially in the areas of flexible working and opportunities for development.
MSD’s Gender and Ethnic Pay Gap Action Plan for 2021-2022 provides insight into gender and ethnic pay gaps at MSD, outlines the progress made in 2020-2021, and lays out a new set of actions for 2021-2022 to reduce our pay gaps further.
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[2] Human Resource Capability data for 2021 will be released in late 2021.
