Statement of Intent 2009-2012

G.39 SOI (2009)

Statement of Intent of the Ministry of Women’s Affairs

Te Pūrongo Matapaetanga a te Minitatanga mō ngā Wāhine

2009–2012

 Click HERE for a PDF version.

Table of contents

Message from the Minister of Women’s Affairs
Chief Executive’s foreword
Our role and purpose
The strategic context in which we work
Our priorities for the next three years
Our international obligations
Measuring our performance
Our organisational capability
Managing in a changeable operating environment
Endnotes

Message from the Minister of Women’s Affairs

My goal is that women should have real choices and be able to use their strengths to maximise social and economic success – for themselves, for their families and for New Zealand as a whole. In order to achieve this, we need a more integrated, ‘whole-of-life’, approach to women’s policies.

I support all the priorities set out in this Statement of Intent. As Minister I will also be taking a particular interest in several areas.

I want to see a significant increase in the numbers of women on boards and in senior management in both the state and private sectors.

I want to see violence against women decrease and eventually be eliminated.

And I want to see New Zealand reap the benefits of more equal pay and employment practices across the state and private sectors.

We need to ensure that women have good choices at all stages of their lives, and that those choices do not restrict future opportunities.

We also need to ensure New Zealand maintains and enhances the strong reputation it has for advancing the status and well-being of women internationally.

My expectations are that the Ministry will continue to provide me with high-quality policy advice – an essential foundation for my role in Cabinet.

I am fortunate to have the support of my colleagues to do more, in-depth, work relating to the gender pay gap and contributing issues such as employment practices and occupational segregation.
 
I am satisfied that the information on future operating intentions provided by my department in this Statement of Intent is in accordance with sections 38, 40 and 41 of the Public Finance Act 1989 and is consistent with the policies and performance expectations of the government.


Hon Pansy Wong
Minister of Women’s Affairs
28 May 2009

BACK TO TOP

Chief Executive’s foreword

This year we move beyond the Action Plan for New Zealand Women, which has guided the Ministry’s work for the past five years.

The Action Plan has been successfully completed and this Statement of Intent sets out the priority goals that will drive the Ministry’s work for the next 3-5 years.

There is both continuity and change in those goals.

The programme retains a strong focus on issues such as ending sexual violence and increasing the numbers of women in leadership. These are areas where change will only come slowly, and consistent, long-term approaches are required.

There are changes in emphasis, though, reflecting both what we have learnt over the past five years and the priorities of the new government. These include more of a focus on looking at the choices women make across their lifetimes, and better understanding the implications of those choices.

This will lead to a greater emphasis on issues, such as young women’s career choices, that have long-term impacts.

We will also be focusing more on women’s and men’s contribution to caring and the impacts that time out of the paid workforce has on long-term employment and income.

Our main goals are clearly set out in this Statement of Intent. Our work programme will give substance to those goals.

In signing this statement, I acknowledge that I am responsible for the information contained in the Statement of Intent for the Ministry of Women’s Affairs. This information has been prepared in accordance with the Public Finance Act 1989. It is also consistent with the proposed appropriations set out in the Appropriations (2009/10 Estimates) Bill, as presented to the House of Representatives in accordance with section 13 of the Public Finance Act 1989, and with existing appropriations and financial authorities.


Shenagh Gleisner
Chief Executive
28 May 2009

Our role and purpose

This section describes what we do, why we do it, and how we go about it.

The Ministry of Women’s Affairs provides advice to enable government to ensure women have real choices and use their strengths to maximise social and economic success. The Ministry is primarily a policy agency. It does not provide services directly to the public, is not an advocacy organisation, and does not have an international development role. Its core roles are:

 BACK TO TOP

The strategic context in which we work

This section notes the major developments in the operating environment and the impact these have on the Ministry’s work.

Significant changes in the past 12 months

Since the last Statement of Intent (SOI) there have been significant changes in our operating environment that impact on the Ministry’s work:

• There has been a change of government.
• There has been a marked and rapid economic downturn.
• The Action Plan for New Zealand Women, which has guided the Ministry’s work for the past five years, is coming to an end.

The broad impacts of those changes are reflected in the goal and priorities set out in this SOI.

The goal provided by the new Minister of Women’s Affairs is for women to have real choices and to be able to use their strengths to maximise social and economic success for themselves, their families and New Zealand as a whole.

The priorities for the Ministry reflect that goal, and the reality that New Zealand (along with the rest of the world) is entering a period of lower economic growth.

The Ministry believes that the current economic environment presents opportunities for women, as well as risks. For instance, there is clear evidence that under-using women’s skills impacts negatively on the success of individual businesses and on the economy as a whole. In difficult times businesses may be more willing to make changes to better harness those skills.

Longer-term trends

While there have been significant changes to the Ministry’s operating environment in the past year, some longer-term trends are securely in place.

We plan to monitor progress across a range of social outcomes associated with our priority areas. We have developed an initial set of ‘outcome indicators’¹ that can be extracted from existing data collection, and we will report progress against these indicators on the Ministry’s website, continually updating them as data sources are renewed.

Once the indicators become established and sufficient history is available, we can report on trends in the indicators. Until then, there is already some information available on long-term trends.

Generally things have been getting better for women as successive governments have removed the legal barriers to equality, and society’s attitudes and expectations have changed.

Women are doing well in some important areas:

• Health – women’s life expectancy continues to increase (a woman’s life expectancy at birth is around 82 years)
• Education – the number of young women graduating at tertiary level has increased significantly in the last decade. In 2007, 61 percent of students who completed a tertiary qualification were women² and women accounted for 54 percent (241,000) of domestic students enrolled in tertiary education.³ 
• Labour force participation – women’s participation in the labour force was at a record level of 63.2 percent in the Household Labour Force Survey: December 2008 quarter – an increase of 0.6 percentage points from the previous quarter. This compares with a labour force participation rate for men of 75.8 percent – an increase of 0.7 percentage points from the previous quarter.⁴

The Ministry sees the main challenges for women as including:

Women’s skills are under-used in leadership and governance roles

• Women are under-represented in leadership across the economy.
• Only 23 percent of public service department chief executives were women in 2007.⁵
• Women leaders remain scarce in the private sector, with women making up 8.7 percent of board members of NZSX Top 100 companies in 2007.⁶

Sexual violence and domestic violence continue to impact disproportionately on women

• Almost one in five New Zealand women (19.3 percent) and one in 20 men (4.9 percent) have experienced sexual interference or assault in their lifetime.⁷
• Lifetime prevalence rates for sexual violence are highest for young women (25.6 percent of 17-24 year-olds) and for Māori women (23.4 percent).⁸
• Just over 26 percent of New Zealand women have experienced violence by a male partner in their lifetime, compared with just over 18 percent of men who have experienced violence by a female partner in their lifetime.⁹ 
• The lifetime prevalence rate for violence by a male partner is highest for Māori women (49.3 percent). The rate for Pacific women is 23.3 percent.¹⁰

A stubborn pay gap

• While women’s incomes are increasing, the gender pay gap has remained ‘stuck’ at around 12 percent since 2001.
• In the June 2008 quarter, women’s median hourly earnings were $17.50, compared with $20.00 for men.¹¹
• Pākehā women’s median hourly earnings ($18.22) were significantly higher than both Māori and Pacific women’s ($15.15 and $14.75 respectively).¹²

However, simple comparisons between men and women do not paint the full picture. Not only do women continue to have poorer outcomes in many areas than men, some groups of women continue to have poorer outcomes relative to each other. For example, Māori women have poorer outcomes in many key areas, even after adjusting for socio-economic status; and migrant and refugee women often face cultural and language barriers in addition to those faced by other New Zealand women.

Policy approaches will have to increasingly focus on this diversity, as there will be significant changes in the ethnic composition of the New Zealand population over the next two decades. These include substantial increases in the proportion of Asian, Māori and Pacific people in the population.

Our priorities for the next three years

This section describes what our work involves, and our contribution to the government’s outcomes.

What we do, and whom we influence, creates positive change for New Zealand women. Our work makes an impact (sometimes indirectly through other agencies) that improves real choices for women and enables them to use their strengths to maximise social and economic success.

The diagram below shows how ‘what we do’ (the interventions we put in place) is directed towards achieving the outcomes and priorities of the government, and in particular for women. It shows the value chain from the capability and outputs of the Ministry through to the outcomes for women sought by the government.

The outcomes sought, our contribution, and the impact of our and other agencies’ work

The following outcomes are aspirational, and are in order of priority. Over the next 3-5 years we will focus most work on the first five outcomes, and particularly on the first three. Little work is anticipated on Outcome 6 in the short term, but this may change if resources allow.

Our international obligations

This section outlines our work on New Zealand’s international obligations.

The Ministry is the lead agency for managing New Zealand’s international obligations on the status of women and is responsible for managing the process of reporting on New Zealand’s obligations under the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), the core international document for advancing the status of women.

The principal focus of the Ministry’s international work in 2009/10 will be preparing New Zealand’s seventh report to the CEDAW Committee, in consultation with relevant government agencies and key stakeholders. The report, which is due in September 2010, will outline New Zealand’s progress in implementing all CEDAW articles, as well as New Zealand’s response to specific recommendations made by the CEDAW Committee in 2007 on the sixth report.

The Ministry will support the Minister of Women’s Affairs to present the report (in 2011) and to respond to any issues raised by the CEDAW Committee. It will also support ministerial attendance at other important international meetings, including the Commonwealth, States, Territories and New Zealand Ministerial Conference on the Status of Women (MINCO) and the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women (CSW).

The Ministry also facilitates meetings of the Caucus on International Women’s Issues, a domestic forum to encourage an exchange of information and experience among those working in international forums to address issues relevant to the well-being of women.

Measuring our performance

This section outlines our progress and plans on our monitoring and evaluative work, which will assist us to learn whether the outcomes and intermediate outcomes are being achieved, whether our interventions are working, and how we can continue to improve our effectiveness.

It is difficult to directly measure the effectiveness of the Ministry’s contribution to final outcomes, particularly where the actions or changes may take years to fully take effect, may be led by other agencies, or may relate to apparently intractable social issues. However, we have some tools we can use.

We carefully select the vital few priority areas and develop intervention logic

Based on government and ministerial priorities, and information from monitoring the Indicators for Change¹⁵ and other sources, we establish the few high-level outcome areas on which to focus. We use clear ‘intervention logic’ as part of all policy advice and development. (Intervention logic shows the links from the Ministry’s outputs to the outcomes sought by government.)

How strongly an issue fits within our priorities framework and the intervention logic will determine how important the issue is and the amount of effort or work we will put into it.

We look at the impact of the Ministry’s nominations service

Annually, key government agencies provide feedback on the effectiveness of our service. This includes an assessment of the suitability of the women candidates we have nominated, as well as the timeliness and relevance of the information we have provided.

We have two quantitative measures that, taken together, broadly indicate the impact of the Ministry’s nominations service. The first is the average of women’s participation across all government boards, as monitored through an annual stocktake of the gender composition of each board. The second quantitative measure is the percentage of new appointments that were women. The Ministry breaks this number down further to analyse how many of the women appointees are on the Ministry’s database and how many were nominated by the Ministry.

These impact measures are imperfect. For example, the collection of annual stocktake data is affected by long time lags, with the stocktake reporting on appointment decisions made as long as 18 months in the past. In the case of new appointments, Ministers may decide not to appoint candidates nominated by the Ministry for reasons that are unrelated to the quality and suitability of our candidates.

We look at the impact of the Ministry’s policy advice

The impact of our policy advice is measured by how much other government agencies’ programmes are enhanced by a gender perspective, or how much influence our advice has had in policy decisions by the government.

Over the next three years, we will assess our impact by how much:

• where we comment on draft papers, our comments are taken on board and reflected accurately
• agencies ask for our input and can say that our input has benefitted them
• we have a reputation for being a ‘centre of policy excellence’ for victim-related advice on violence against women
• we can always supply the key facts and figures available for tracking the status of women when requested
• we participate in all key initiatives that impact on outcomes for women in our three priority areas
• the percentage of women on state sector boards and committees increases
• initiatives to increase the number of women on private sector company boards are developed and carried out by business.

These measures of our impact need considerable development. Some already have strong processes around them and have been in place for a time, but most are new. We are confident that all are measurable and that we can put in place systems to capture this information. Once that is done, we can establish a ‘baseline’ from which we can forecast and assess improvement.

Cost-effectiveness measures

It is difficult to measure how much impact is achieved for the money spent. We cannot determine the dollar value of change for women, or of women’s contribution to society (or even of the impact on others’ work programmes) that results from our policy analysis on any particular issue. What we can do, however, is be sure that our prioritisation and intervention logic approaches enable us to know that, out of all the many things we could be doing at any given time, we are making the best choices and doing the right things – that is the things most likely to make the biggest difference.

Output reporting

Performance measures for the Ministry’s outputs are included in the information supporting the Estimates of Appropriation for Vote Women’s Affairs.

The Ministry will continue to report to the Minister of Women’s Affairs quarterly on the achievements against the agreed work programme to be set out in an Output Plan agreed between the Chief Executive and the Minister.

Our organisational capability

This section outlines the capability we need to achieve our outcomes and what capability developments we will be focusing on in the forthcoming year.

Adjusting capability to meet changing circumstances and expectations

Along with the rest of the Public Service, the Ministry is entering a period of fiscal restraint and changed priorities. The Ministry has also been given some pay and employment responsibilities previously undertaken by the Department of Labour.

This coming year, we will have:

• a particular emphasis on the gender pay gap and different, new, approaches for tackling it
• more focus on women in leadership in the private sector
• a continuing, and very strong, focus on reducing violence against women
• a recognition that all our work is done in the context of tough economic times, with a corresponding need to ensure everything we do contributes towards New Zealand’s economic development.

The Ministry’s capability rests on the quality of its people, information and knowledge, and its systems and processes.

The Ministry is the smallest core government department and does not have the critical mass of resources to progress outcomes for women on its own. To be influential, it therefore needs to work alongside other agencies. We do not usually lead major policy development, but are often in a supportive position, or lead specific projects within a much larger programme of work.

Producing high-quality policy work and nominations advice that other agencies will seek out and can rely upon is the best thing the Ministry can do to be influential.
 
The quality of our nominations advice relies on attracting the best candidates to our database, and matching them to the needs of board and committee vacancies as they arise. We are continually improving our processes to be more effective at doing this.

The focus for the policy team is to stretch further to do more innovative work, rather than relying on traditional core policy competencies alone.

Actively collaborating and engaging with business, public sector agencies, NGOs and community groups

The Ministry engages early in the policy development processes with other agencies, and therefore it is essential that we make high-quality contributions and maintain high-quality relationships. We seek to identify our shared outcomes before we contribute. The Ministry aims to be very well apprised of the activities of other agencies and to be welcomed as part of all relevant policy processes.

The Ministry has an active relationship strategy involving, for example, regular meetings with key NGOs and business; regional public meetings; attendance at key events involving women’s groups; a set of initiatives to support Māori women’s leadership; and linkages with a range of diverse groups of women essential to achieving our goals. A high priority is placed on our relationships with Māori women. We also plan to continue greater engagement with men and young women.

What is planned for the forthcoming year?

Our focus on ending the pay gap will increase as we take over some pay and employment equity responsibilities from the Department of Labour.

We will continue to progressively review, refine and implement our performance measurement framework, which will allow us to assess our performance and contribution to outcomes in an increasingly robust way.

The other significant improvement area is our knowledge management. We have successfully implemented an electronic data and records management system. Over the next year, we will embed the system, and revise the associated internal processes and the intranet.

Preparation of a Human Resources Strategy and an Information Systems Strategic Plan are underway. These will inform the development of our human resources and information systems and processes in the next three years.

Assessing progress

To manage the organisation’s capability, and as part of our approach to learning and development, we continually monitor and assess a range of information sources. Some of the information is not collected regularly, and much of it is qualitative. Together, though, it gives us a full picture of our capability and allows us to learn how we might improve it.

Some key sources of information are:

• post-appointment and exit interviews
• recruitment and retention data
• the employee engagement survey to be run in alternate years (the first was run in June 2008) and the associated action planning
• independent assessment of our policy advice.

In particular, we measure our staff numbers (the current establishment is 36.5 full-time equivalents), our unplanned turnover rate (which, as a small agency, we seek to keep below 25 percent), and ministerial feedback – both ratings and comments.

At the end of the year, we will report on our capability and planned development, using the range of information we monitor.

Equal employment opportunities in the Ministry

In 2006/07, the Ministry and the Public Service Association conducted a Pay and Employment Equity Review of the Ministry. The management team agreed a range of actions, most of which have been implemented. These will be completed in 2009/10.

The Ministry recognises the benefits of diversity in its workforce and management, and has integrated equal employment opportunities into its Human Resources Manual and associated policies and procedures.

Capital expenditure

The forecast capital expenditure for the next three years is primarily for the routine replacement and upgrade of the Ministry’s information technology and office equipment, to maintain efficient delivery of services.

The table below outlines the capital expenditure planned for the next three years.

These figures have been prepared in accordance with New Zealand generally accepted accounting principles. They comply with New Zealand equivalents to IFRS (NZ IFRS) and other applicable Financial Reporting Standards, as appropriate for public benefit entities.

Managing in a changeable operating environment

This section outlines the key risks to the Ministry and how they will be managed.

Risk management

The Ministry’s risk management framework brings together strategic policies and operational procedures and practices to ensure that controls are implemented to prevent or mitigate the impact of identified risks. This approach is consistent with the requirements of the Australian/New Zealand Standard for Risk Management (AS/NZS 4360:2004).

The Executive Management Team has a process of assessing and mitigating, on a quarterly basis, strategic and operational risks for the Ministry as a whole and for each group. This will continue.

The following table sets out the key risks to be managed.

The Ministry will continue to actively monitor the environment in which we work in order to detect developing risks as early as possible and to anticipate influences that may inform our strategies.

Endnotes

1. Ministry of Women’s Affairs (2008) Indicators for Change: Tracking the progress of New Zealand women.

2. Ministry of Education (2009) Gaining qualifications, table COM.12.

3. Ministry of Education (2008) Provider-based enrolments, table ENR.1.

4. Statistics New Zealand (2009) Household Labour Force Survey: December 2008 quarter.

5. Human Rights Commission (2008) New Zealand Census of Women’s Participation: 2008.

6. ibid.

7. Allison Morris et al (2003) New Zealand National Survey of Crime Victims 2001.

8. ibid.

9. ibid. 

10. ibid.

11. Statistics New Zealand (2008). New Zealand Income Survey: June 2008.

12. ibid.

13. This is a World Economic Forum indicator that measures the gap between men and women in economic participation and opportunity, educational attainment, political empowerment and health and survival.

14. ‘Good employer’ is defined in section 56 of the State Sector Act 1988.

15. Ministry of Women’s Affairs (2008) Indicators for Change: Tracking the progress of New Zealand women.

 BACK TO TOP

Ministry of Women's Affairs
48 Mulgrave Street
Thorndon
Wellington
PO Box 10 149
Wellington 6143
tel: (04) 915 7112
fax: (04) 916 1604
email: mwa@mwa.govt.nz
www.mwa.govt.nz