Well-being of women in New Zealand: The changing landscape

Abstract

As the first country to give women the right to vote (in 1893), New Zealand (NZ) has often been viewed as a leader in the global movement towards gender equality. This paper aims to assess trends in overall well-being for NZ women, by pulling together a range of statistical indicators across five key facets of well-being: demographic and family changes, education, employment, health, and crime and violence. From our analysis, two contrasting pictures emerge. The first is that NZ women are clearly making up ground in respect of their education, participation in the labour force (less so in terms of wage equality), and overall health outcomes (barring mental health issues, such as depression). In the second, however, NZ women are trailing behind their other developed nation counterparts when one considers crime and violence, both committed against and by them.

Keywords:

• gender equality
• women's well-being

Notes

1. Particularly the declining proportion of two-parent families as shown by Hyslop and Maré (2005).

2. Note that the following analysis will not attempt to disentangle the various causes and effects. Rather, it endeavours to provide a comprehensive portrait of the changing demographic landscape of NZ by gender since 1966.

3. The scheduled 2011 census was postponed due to the Christchurch earthquake in February 2011.

4. Since 2006, it is likely that the decreasing component of the population that is below 16 has either reversed or stabilised, due to the upsurge in births since mid-2000 (see Section 5 for further details).

5. The changing ethnic mix of the NZ population is also reflected in the evolving data collection methods employed by Statistics NZ. Since the early 1990s, Statistics NZ has moved away from prioritising ethnicity data and instead enables respondents to have the opportunity to co-select a number of ethnicities to describe their background, and consequently, the sum of the ethnic groups is larger than 100% (Statistics NZ, 2005).

6. Pool et al. (2007) describes this phenomenon in greater detail.

7. There is distinct variation in fertility rates across ethnicities. Maori and Pacifica women fertility rates are 2.8 and 3.0 respectively, while women not of these ethnicities have a total fertility rate of 1.8 (Statistics New Zealand, 2011b).

8. Hill and King's paper (1995) highlights the beneficial effects of educating women in particular. They discuss the flow-on effects evident within the family home, such as improved family health, as well as in society as a whole: for example, countries with higher levels of educated women were recognised as experiencing more rapid economic growth and improved quality of life.

9. A downward trend in Maori tertiary participation is evident over the last decade, while other ethnicities are fairly static over the same time period. This can be explained, at least in part, by the decrease in participation of certificate level qualifications (Ministry of Education, 2008), the rate of which has been decreasing since mid-2000.

10. Maani (2002) also finds that the income returns to education are greater for Maori and non-Maori.

11. Note that the Student Loan scheme was institutionalised in 1992, improving access for both genders to education in the tertiary sector.

12. This is in line with the findings that women are more inclined to participate in and complete a tertiary qualification than men (Scott, 2005).

13. See Pacheco (2011) and Pacheco and Cruickshank (2007) for further information on rises in the NZ minimum wage resulting in increased educational enrolments and reduced employment propensities for youth in particular.

14. Full-time participation in the labour market was defined as 30 + hours per week from the 1986 Census, and prior to that it was 20 + hours per week. To ensure comparison of like with like, we adopt the 20 + hours definition for the later period of 2006.

15. See Dixon (2000) for a discussion on the ways in which gender differences in job attributes can explain wage differentials, as well as possible demand/supply factors that may drive differences in job type.

16. Data sourced from the New Zealand Tobacco Survey, Ministry of Health (2010).

17. The choice of the 13 OECD countries was made by the Ministry of Health (2009) based on reliability of data collection processes, and historical comparators for NZ.

18. Note that Fergusson, Horwood and Ridder (2006) argue that young women (25 years of age and younger) who have had an abortion may be associated with an increased risk of mental health problems.

19. Author's compilation.

20. Note there appears to be a marked drop in the life expectancy estimates for both Maori males and females in 1996. This is most likely due to a change in classification by Statistics NZ, whereby they moved from the concept of Maori population (related to bloodlines) to focusing on Maori Ethnic Group (in which individuals self select their ethnicity). For more information on the changing definition of the Maori Ethnic Group, see Statistics NZ (2010).

21. The 2006 Disability Survey from which the Social Report draws from reported a significant decline in the levels of disabilities compared with previous surveys, which they attribute in part to methodological factors.

22. As discussed in Section 5, the linkages between the different factors, the misspecification of household, personal and area-level factors, limitations of prevalence-based counts and issues surrounding causation should all be kept in mind when interpreting these datasets. In addition, further caution is needed when making inferences from the confrontational crime data as the groups from which the data were drawn were small and, as a consequence, may be more subject to sampling errors.

23. Numbers pertaining to sexual offences should be interpreted keeping in mind that this is the type of crime most likely to be underreported.

24. The New Zealand Crime and Safety Survey: 2009 also identified Maori as being more at risk of being a victim to confrontational crime by a partner or someone well known to them (Ministry of Justice, 2010).

25. See, for example, a recent paper by the UN Development Programme, which identifies violence against women as remaining a key detriment to the well-being of women worldwide (Desai, 2010).