Discrimination against women is incompatible with human dignity and with the welfare of the family and of society, prevents their participation on equal terms with men in the political, social, economic and cultural life of their countries and is an obstacle to the full development of the potentialities of women in the service of their countries and of humanity United Nations Declaration on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women
The Values Party supports the work of the UN Commission on the status of women and endorses the UN aims in designating this year as International Women's Year. We believe it is time that the status of women be considered an important priority in New Zealand politics and have taken the initiative by offering a comprehensive policy in this chapter of our party's manifesto.
However we would not be content with raising the status of women simply on male terms. We aim also to raise the status of traditional womens values which have stressed co-operation rather than competition, nurturing, healing, and cherishing instead of exploiting, destroying and conquering, and peace instead of conflict. We agree with Matthew Arnold that “if ever the world sees a time when women shall come together purely and simply for the benefit and good of mankind, it will be a power such as the world has never known."
We hope that International Women's Year will be that time but stress that it “must not benefit only a small minority of women, conferring on them a spurious and privileged equality in an unequal world. If International Women's Year becomes obsessed by this kind of equality - equality for the few inside the old structures at the expense of many and of the possibility of new structures - it will be irrelevant to the vast majority of women” (“New Internationalist” Jan. 1975.)
We therefore ask New Zealand women to broaden their women’s movement so that “it does not simply seek admission to a system which is itself leading the world into despair” (Ibid). We commend to them all our party's policies for building an alternative system which would stress values that women have traditionally perceived were more important than those which currently prevail.
The Values Party's policy on the status of women is based on five premises:
We need the imagination, dedication, and creativity of everyone ... for a mutually respecting and supportive planetary society.” (Dr Margaret Mead.)
New Zealand society is characterised by a sexual version of apartheid. From the beginning children are taught concepts of masculinity and femininity, both deliberately and unconsciously. A girl's attention is directed in and on herself and the home. A boy is conditioned to look out to society and the world. Initiative, aggression and competitive instincts are strongly fostered in male children; tenderness, self control and flexibility in female children.
Girls are encouraged to be decorative, helpful and clean. Boys are encouraged to be adventurous, curious and rough. Girls have different toys and different books from boys. Relatively few toys are usually given to children of both sexes. Books for children reflect the same bias. Many studies show that two thirds of story books feature boys compared with one third featuring girls in both illustrations and text. Education in sex roles outside of formal education is the main influence in keeping the status of women low. It is not so much that it controls a woman's alternatives but rather her motivation to choose any but one of those alternatives. As a result, half the population is under-rated, under-encouraged and under-achieving. How many potentially effective human beings can we afford to suppress in the name of traditional role playing?
By the time children start school they have already been burdened with an enormous load of traditional masculine and feminine lore - how a man should behave, what a woman should be. Stereotyping is less blatant in the school system and is effected more by individual teachers and the pupils’ own peers than by the system itself. Nevertheless, education for girls differs in extent and substance from education for boys.
Girls observe that women predominate at the lower levels of the school system and man at the higher levels. They are more likely to have a male head of their school than a female. They do better academically at school than boys until puberty, yet leave school earlier with fewer qualifications. They take different subjects at secondary school. Fewer of them go on to tertiary education and again, those who do, take different subjects and degrees from those taken by most men.
Although in theory, educational opportunities are as available to girls as to boys, the assumptions made by pupils, teachers and parents seriously limit the girls’ education.
Boys know education is relevant to them: they know they will have to get a job and work most of their lives: they fear failure. School seems less relevant to a girl once she has been taught that her main interest is supposed to be in the home and her main aim is to attract a man. Failure is less important to her as there is always the escape route of marriage.
From the day she starts school to the day she leaves a girl can assume she will receive approval for what she Is (as an object) rather than for what she does (as a subject).
Academic success can restrict the number of marriage partners available to her and so the motivation of older female students to achieve is less than that of their male peers.
Education at school will continue to be inadequate in preparing girls for careers and parenthood for as long as society fosters different expectations for each sex and the belief that sex roles must differ for men and women.
Education for sex roles extends beyond school into adulthood and continues until death. As reality often does not match the expectations girls have about marriage or boys about work, adults of both sexes need constant assurances and admonitions to bolster up the crumbling walls of the old stereotypes. The mass media do a lot of role reinforcing.
Advertisements show passive, obliging, dependent women, always child-like, slim and decorative, often in competition with other women and envying them. Men are shown as strong, successful, able to own status symbols, admired by women, knowledgeable, cool and efficient.
It is ironic that a society which is so geared to sex roles makes such poor provision for the women whose opportunities for continuing education are restricted by childbearing and domestic responsibilities.
"everyone who works has the right to just and favourable remuneration ... ensuring an existence worthy of human dignity."
In the long term, a Values Government would implement a national minimum income scheme which would provide for actual payments to be made to those working usefully without proper remuneration by society, additional to the income which belonged to everyone by right (see Economics policy).
In the meantime, we believe that a fair wage, broadly graded according to actual work done and actual responsibility carried, should be paid by the State to every person irrespective of sex who works in the home or within the community caring part-time or full-time for a person who is partially or totally dependent for reasons of age and/or physical or mental health and who would otherwise be a charge upon the State. This wage would not include remuneration for any housework other than that generated by the dependants they are being employed to care for.
The twentieth century has seen an enormous improve- ment in the health of women in most countries, primarily because of new birth control technology. Previously, many women spent most of their lives pregnant or breast feeding. They died early, their bodies worn out by continual childbirth - often they died in childbirth.
Their new freedom to choose parenthood or not has enabled women to seek more personal freedom in other areas of their lives too. For more detail on the relevance of the new birth control technology see the section on fertility control in the chapter “Individual Freedom”, (which deals with sex edxucation, contra- ception, sterilisation, and abortion).
Our policies on women's health are based on our belief that all persons should have as much say as possible over what happens to their bodies.
We disapprove of the degree to which childbirth has been institutionalised and depersonalised.
We are concerned that the incidence of mental breakdown in New Zealand is substantially higher among women than men as evidenced by the high ratio of women to men in admittances to mental hospitals and the high proportion of women in total attempted suicides.
“Research .. has related this situation to depression caused by the pressures of domestic and social conditions on women, particularly those fully engaged in the home ... (and those) in the childbearing age group.” Report of the NZ Select Committee on Women’s Rights, June 1975, p.81.
The Values Party believes all its policies on the status of women would reduce these pressures and improve these conditions.
The Values Party would discourage all practices resulting from regulations, orders, stipulations, awards and rulings which assume that women, especially married women, have only dependent status or which assume that women are financially irresponsible and not credit-worthy or that breadwinners are necessarily male (for example the Housing Corporation defines the breadwinner as the male spouse if he is capable of working).
The Values Party is particularly concerned by the effect of urbanisation on Maori women. Since 1971 the rate of urbanisation has risen from 25 to 70 per cent of the total.
Maori women marry younger, start bearing children earlier, bear larger numbers of children, and stop childbearing later.
Since Maori families are larger and their breadwinners’ wages lower, Maori women are being forced to work at a crucial stage in their children’s lives in order to supplement the family income. 24.7 per cent (1971) of all married Maori women work. They tend to be younger than their counterparts and they work between pregnancies.
Their earnings are extremely low mainly because of the fact that 89 per cent of them have no qualifications.
The Values Party believes that its policies on the status of women and on race relations would greatly reduce the social and economics pressures on maori women.
Previous sections present policy to:
In addition to the provisions in policies given above, general legislation is needed to bring New Zealand law into conformity with international instruments relating to the status of women.
Much of our law has developed from the basis of Victorian male attitudes which were paternalistic and protective towards women, relegating them to a position of dependence. Such attitudes persist among members of the public and cannot be changed overnight but there is no reason for any delay in altering all New Zealand laws developed on such an unjustifiable basis. Such alterations will promote the changes needed in attitudes throughout our society, especially if complemented by educative action.
It is a fact that power in most of the forms that matter in our society - in government, in commerce, in religion, in community status - plus the power of wealth, weapons, and the press is largely in men’s hands in New Zealand.
The Values Party szes no reason in terms of inherent qualities why a woman should not be able to undertake any job for which she is qualified and to be successful in that job. Yet historically women have been employed in large numbers only when there is a shortage of male workers or where it is cheaper to pay women than men. New Zealand has a shortage of skilled labour which it prefers to relieve by means of immigration. The Values Party would however look to the vast segments of our indigenous population which are employed below their potential (and sometimes below their skill, particularly when re-entering the workforce). Most of these are women.
Women in employment are generally unskilled or semi-skilled, doing jobs with minimal responsibility and jobs which are mechanical, repetitive and boring (“that men couldn't be expected to do’). The number of occupations effectively open to women is limited - men dominate factory, transport and agricultural jobs while women hold by far the greatest proportion of clerical and service jobs.
Over the last three censuses the annual median income for female workers has been only half the level for males. This will be somewhat improved when the Equal Pay Act is fully implemented in 1977. However, although equal pay has been in force for years in the Public Service, women still occupy lower rather than higher grades. Unless New Zealand is careful its equal pay legislation could fail by default as has happened elsewhere, especially with regard to the effects of fringe benefits (such as gratuities, low-interest home loans, medical and pension schemes) and job reclassification on real earning differentials.
The issue of equal pay is neatly side-stepped also in fields where certain positions are always filled by women.
The Values Party believes that in determining fair rates of pay in occupations filled mainly by women, notional male rates must be based on what employers would have to pay male employees recruited from the labour pool in any given region, and based also on job evaluations which have been carried out scientifically rather than by rule of thumb.
Fair pay must be accompanied by fair conditions. The reason some occupations, previously filled exclusively by men, are now accepting women, is often because the poor conditions _are not attracting enough male applicants. In order to improve working conditions for both men and women.
With regard to promotion opportunities and practices,
It will take some time before new promotion practices alter the domination of men in executive positions and the marked absence of women from senior positions in all fields. Remedial measures are needed to help women who have been employed for some time to compensate for past lack of opportunity.
Much valuable and productive work is done for society by workers who receive no renumeration for their work. In many cases such people are therefore forced ‘to become themselves dependent on the charity or generosity of a friend, relative, spouse, or sexual partner, despite the fact that they are healthy, sane, adult and working both fulltime and overtime. Hundreds of thousands of women are just such workers, caring for dependants, supervising pupils of the correspondence school, and doing voluntary social work. The late Mr N. E. Kirk said (26.6.73) “If the homemaker’s sister goes out to work, she gets paid at the same rate as men. Where is the economic justice in motherhood and for the homemaker?”
Although jobs done by women in normal employment are usually socially lower-rated and less prestigious, the job of housewife is at the bottom of the pile - very low social status, no leave, no sickness benefit, no superannuation, and no income-related accident compensation (though the home is eight times as dangerous as a farm and six times as dangerous as a factory).
Society praises the role of the mother in nurturing and caring for her family yet fails to give her any real support in performing this function and penalises her for the rest of her life for having done it. Even the most unskilled full-time paid job carried occupational benefits in contrast to which the housewife caring for dependants, on whose physical and mental resources enormous demands are made, is in the unique position of having no call on standard conditions of employment.
The Values Party believes that whatever role a woman chooses it should be freely chosen on the basis that it will not place her at any disadvantage compared with other sections of the community.
All magistrates (bar one) and judges, almost all ministers of religion, business executives and university professors, most academics and profession- als, most of the armed forces and mass media, and most of the owners of resources in New Zealand are men.
Women are for the most part absent from union meetings, trade councils and the annual conference of the Federation of Labour. They have always been totally absent from the National Executive of the Federation of Labour, and the teams representing New Zealand at the annual I.L.O. Conferences.
In our parliament, 83 out of 87 seats are held by men, yet men are only 48.7 per cent of the population. There were no women in parliament at all until 1933 even though women got the vote in 1893 and have been able to stand for Parliament since 1919.