Jonathan: Hello. Welcome, everyone. This is Live Rem’s Quick Bites webinar. I'm just going to wait about 30 seconds to get all the attendees in.

So thanks for coming along today. You'll notice something a little bit different about today. I'm hosting it, not Kat, so for those people attending a Quick Bites webinar for the first time, this is Live Rem's short and impactful 30-minute lunch-and-learn-style webinars. Basically, it's a chance for you to get a little bit of in-depth information about what we do and what our data is, as well as hearing from different HR leaders in the market today.

For those who don’t know us, Live Rem gives leaders confidence in pay conversations through real-time and automated salary data.

Today, I'm sitting here with Nat Ferguson, the co-founder of Powrsuit. For those who don't know Nat, I'm going to briefly introduce her, and hopefully, I’ll get it right.

So, Nat is the co-founder of Powrsuit, which is helping empower women throughout their careers and is also the ex co-founder of Hatch Invest. So, long experience basically building businesses.

To introduce myself, I’m Jonathan Morgan. I am the co-founder and CTO of LiveRem. My background is actually in IT, leading tech teams—everything from EROAD to WayBeyond. I was the CTO of WayBeyond and ran the engineering teams at The Warehouse Group. I'm not a gender pay gap expert, but I am a person who likes to read a lot of research. And I do happen to have access to a lot of data now.

I also have a nine-year-old daughter, so I’d say I have an interest in this area. I've actually had an interest for a number of years now. But, you know, again, I don’t spend my life doing this.

So, I guess before we get started, Nat, maybe you can introduce yourself and give a bit about what you do.

Nat: Absolutely. And also, side note—thank you for saying that you haven’t always thought about it and that you've got this nine-year-old. I think that’s really important for these conversations—to acknowledge that, yeah, we haven’t all grown up with the same experience. So, it’s actually fine to come to this a little bit later.

Thank you, everyone, for joining. For a bit of background on me, I’ll just give an overview of what Powrsuit does. We call ourselves a “career accelerator” because our goal very early on was to close the gender leadership gap, which actually has a massive impact on the gender pay gap as well.

But really, the way we do that is instead of focusing on top-down change, we equip women with the tools and connections to navigate a workforce that was designed before women really participated in it. We are among the first couple of generations to be visible at every level, and that means some of the challenges we face are unique.

There’s really nothing out there for the rest of us. Once you get to senior leadership positions, there’s often a lot of support, but for the rest of us on the way up, we end up feeling like we have to deal with it on our own. So, we teach great fundamental skills and self-leadership skills, but with a slant toward what women need to consider—the unique stuff we face.

Jonathan: Okay. So, today we’re going to do things a little differently. Normally, Kat interviews the guest, but today we’re going to make this more of a conversation and ask questions back and forth.

To kick things off, I’m going to let Nat start us off.

Nat: Yeah, I like this. I feel like what we’re trying to role model today is that we can just have these conversations. You can go back and forth. We may not have all the answers, but we need to start talking about it, even if it’s a little complicated.

So, I’m going to start with one that probably feels kind of obvious, but I actually don’t think it is: What is the gender pay gap?

Jonathan: Yeah, it’s actually an interesting question because it’s one that comes up a lot when we talk to people. Most people kind of say they don’t have a gender pay gap.

The gender pay gap itself is a simple calculation, which is normally the median male salary minus the median female salary divided by the median male salary. So, what is the overall difference between what you’re paying men and women in your organization?

The common confusion is comparing it with pay parity, which is if you look at, say, a role-by-role comparison. For example, is there any differentiation between a man and a woman doing the same role? If you hear someone say they’ve got a zero gender pay gap when they compare role by role, they’re actually talking about pay parity.

Pay parity is an interesting one. I think it’s a legal requirement—I looked it up, and I think it’s been in place since 1978. I happened to see pay parity payments in some of our customers' results. It’s something that people can be sued for or file a personal grievance over if they don’t have it.

So, it’s kind of that minimum standard. What I’ve found interesting is that over my career, I’ve never sat in an exec team and heard anyone ask, “Do we have pay parity problems?” It’s probably still something worthwhile to look at when analyzing data.

Jonathan: So what the media talks about, what the government talks about is the overall gender pay gap in New Zealand is about 19%. In our data, it's actually about 18%. Quite often when they talk about the gender pay gap in New Zealand, they're talking about the government data or the openly reported data. If you look at certain organizations, and we've talked to other benchmarking people in New Zealand, theirs is actually even above that 20%

Nat: That was actually a real light bulb moment for me when you explained that the other day. This is the case with any data, right? It depends on the sources. I think when we see those big headlines, I think New Zealand sits at about 9% in those big headlines. Of course, most organizations don't know the gender pay gap, don't record it. So, of course, it's not going to be included in the results. I think that's something really interesting to see—that what we think it is and what it actually is are two different things. I have a quick follow-up for you, which is also a big one: Why should men care about the gender pay gap?

Jonathan: I guess it’s an interesting one. I’d probably say it’s not about men caring; it’s about everyone caring. People should care about it. When I look at this, I think there are three clear viewpoints that I see in the market today.

The first one is one that—when I was discussing this with a bunch of other males working in leadership positions—it’s caused by what they call the “pregnancy penalty.” Women go and have kids, and so they earn less. There’s actually a McKinsey study from ages ago that said 80% of the gender pay gap is caused by the pregnancy penalty. Now, I think it’s a bit of an oversimplification of that viewpoint. It’s not to say that’s statistically wrong, but it doesn’t talk about why it happens.

The next viewpoint is the one that, if you took a really harsh view on it, we shouldn’t call it the gender pay gap. We should actually just say, “We pay women less than men,” because that’s pretty much what it is. In our organization, we’re paying women less than men, and that’s not fair.

When you start to look at that, Kernel Wealth, one of the KiwiSaver funds out there, released a media release where they talked about KiwiSaver contributions. At every single age bracket, women contributed less than men. If I look at our data, we see the exact same thing—at every single age bracket, women earn less than men.

I actually sat down with my 9-year-old daughter this morning over breakfast and tried to have a discussion about the gender pay gap. I asked her, “Do you think women should be paid less than men?” The simple answer, from her point of view, is no—that’s not fair.

That’s where you get a lot of the anger around this, which is rightly so. People are paid less than others, and it doesn’t make sense.

The third viewpoint is the one we have at LiveRem, and it’s one we’ve started to notice with a couple of our customers and the people we talk to. When I look at the gender pay gap, I ask, “What’s caused it? What’s driving this?” You’ve got three areas that drive it.

One is that women in leadership roles seem to be missing. That’s something Nat’s working on with her business. Women take pregnancy leave or, for whatever reason, they don’t get promoted into leadership roles. Leadership roles are paid more, and so you get a gender pay gap.

The second is that certain roles have pay parity issues. If I look across our data set, it’s not every role. If I’m going to call out a couple, one is senior developers—male senior developers are getting paid overall more than female senior developers. Another is senior accountants. Both are male-dominated industries.

The final reason is that certain jobs seem to be done by females and others by males, and the ones males do get paid more.

Now, that’s exciting because you can sit there and ask, “What are we missing? How can we turn this around?” From a business point of view, I care because these biases leading to gaps mean there’s additional talent available for certain roles that we’re not recruiting in.

Everyone talks about talent shortages. Historically, they talk about talent shortages, and if you look at all the economic data, we’re going to have another talent shortage in New Zealand by mid-2026.

If I want to be successful in business, I want to recruit the top talent. I want to recruit the best person for the job. That doesn’t mean the person who looks like everyone else who’s done the job before.

If I look at senior developers, there’s no reason why women are worse than men or men are better than women. There’s actually a study from 2016 where GitHub reviewed code submissions and found that women were more likely to have their code reviews go straight through without any comments than men. But they added a really interesting asterisk. When the gender of the developer wasn’t known, the code was taken at face value and sent through. When another developer knew it was a woman, there were more comments.

Nat: It’s so interesting you say that because I was at a thing the other day, and they do personality testing. Someone was talking about testing across tens of thousands of people to see if there were disparities between genders. They found the difference was often non-existent or minimal on key traits we require for leaders. But they did find that even within women, different countries had big disparities in those traits.

So, when you go to the pure data and remove anything identifiable, there’s no difference. It’s just when you add cultural and bias layers that things start to look different.

The third viewpoint is the one we have at LivRem, and it’s one we’ve started to notice with a couple of our customers and the people we talk to. When I look at the gender pay gap, I ask, “What’s caused it? What’s driving this?” You’ve got three areas that drive it.

One is that women in leadership roles seem to be missing. That’s something Nat’s working on with her business. Women take pregnancy leave or, for whatever reason, they don’t get promoted into leadership roles. Leadership roles are paid more, and so you get a gender pay gap.

The second is that certain roles have pay parity issues. If I look across our data set, it’s not every role. If I’m going to call out a couple, one is senior developers—male senior developers are getting paid overall more than female senior developers. Another is senior accountants. Both are male-dominated industries.

The final reason is that certain jobs seem to be done by females and others by males, and the ones males do get paid more.

Now, that’s exciting because you can sit there and ask, “What are we missing? How can we turn this around?” From a business point of view, I care because these biases leading to gaps mean there’s additional talent available for certain roles that we’re not recruiting in.

Everyone talks about talent shortages. Historically, they talk about talent shortages, and if you look at all the economic data, we’re going to have another talent shortage in New Zealand by mid-2026.

If I want to be successful in business, I want to recruit the top talent. I want to recruit the best person for the job. That doesn’t mean the person who looks like everyone else who’s done the job before.

If I look at senior developers, there’s no reason why women are worse than men or men are better than women. There’s actually a study from 2016 where GitHub reviewed code submissions and found that women were more likely to have their code reviews go straight through without any comments than men. But they added a really interesting asterisk. When the gender of the developer wasn’t known, the code was taken at face value and sent through. When another developer knew it was a woman, there were more comments.

Nat: It’s so interesting you say that because I was at a thing the other day, and they do personality testing. Someone was talking about testing across tens of thousands of people to see if there were disparities between genders. They found the difference was often non-existent or minimal on key traits we require for leaders. But they did find that even within women, different countries had big disparities in those traits.

So, when you go to the pure data and remove anything identifiable, there’s no difference. It’s just when you add cultural and bias layers that things start to look different.

Jonathan: Yeah. So, I guess to turn that question around, why do you think it’s important?

Nat: I think it’s important because, as you said, rather than calling it a gender pay gap, we should say, "We’re paying women less." I almost think of it as a gender opportunity gap.

Overall, like you say, there’s a bunch of stuff—this simplistic view of women taking breaks for having children, the biases around that, and the fact that we say, without even thinking, “Oh, maybe I won’t promote her just yet because she might leave in a couple of years to have children.” Or, “Now she’s back. Let’s give her—under the guise of nice phrasing and good intentions—let’s make sure she doesn’t have to travel too much because she’s got children now.” That cuts off opportunities.

I think the opportunity gap makes it really important because, like you said, Warren Buffett phrased it really well: Look how far the world has come, and we’ve only done it utilizing half the population. This gender opportunity gap is a huge opportunity for the world.

When you look at different industries, you can start to see it. There are two examples that make this really important.

One is you see it in Japan. I spoke to someone in Korea the other day, and it’s the same thing. Women stop having babies. When it presents an opportunity gap for us, there are countries around the world now experiencing very real economic impacts of not having the same level of opportunities for women. Their economic growth is slowing down or stopping.

From an economic point of view, seeing that this other half of the population is incredibly important to drive growth is amazing.

The second example is at an individual company level. This is where it can be really hard for leaders because it’s often a dotted line rather than a solid line to performance. I was at a conference a while ago, and there were two sessions in the morning. One was about AI, and the other was about how to embrace more women in finance—not just as employees, but as a customer base.

For anyone who doesn’t know, in the financial world, 50% of the population is women. Women are the biggest beneficiaries of the greatest wealth transfer happening right now. Women also statistically outlive their partners. The vast majority of women, when their partner passes away, will change their financial advisor within a very short time because they haven’t been served.

So, for this industry, there’s a pressing need to bring more women into the industry and optimize their offering to capture 50% of their potential customer base.

What I found at this conference was that all the women went to the session on how to get more women in finance, and all the men—literally all the men except one—went to the talk about AI. There is such a blind spot about women as an opportunity for economic growth, within your company, and as part of your customer base.

Women represent half the buying power in the world and control 85% of global spending. From a company growth perspective, closing some of these opportunity gaps is a huge potential.

Jonathan: Cool. So, if we take this issue to the workplace directly, how does it affect the dynamic in the workplace? As a male, this is something I didn’t think about until about six years ago. All throughout my career, it was just something that never even crossed my mind. But in terms of a female working through the corporate world, how does it actually affect workplace dynamics?

Nat: Great question. There are a lot of different layers to this. I think the first thing that’s most obvious is representation in leadership. When women don’t see women in leadership roles, it creates a feeling of “this isn’t the place for me.” It can feel unwelcoming.

It also affects decision-making. A diverse leadership team makes better decisions. There’s so much research on this—companies with diverse leadership outperform their peers consistently. If your leadership team isn’t diverse, it doesn’t represent the employees or customers it serves.

Another layer is that workplaces often unintentionally create environments that favor men. Simple things like the times meetings are scheduled or the informal chats that happen on the golf course exclude women. These things may seem small, but over time, they create significant gaps in access to opportunities and relationships.

Nat: I reckon we have to break it down into those two different things. Pay parity as in not being paid the same for the same job. I don't know how many women you know, but I have countless examples of friends and peers who have found out that they are being paid less to do the same job.

And the most shocking example was about, I want to say, four years ago, where a friend of mine found a new job. She gave up in the end. She left and found a job with a $20,000 pay rise. When her manager found out, they turned up with a very ceremonial envelope, slipped it to her, and offered her a $5,000 pay rise, which was still beneath what the men in her role were being paid—and $15,000 less than what she'd been offered.

That pay parity thing just showcases that women leave, and they leave quietly. We had the phenomenon of "quiet quitting," that idea of just walking out and no one ever knowing why. And we still, at Power Suit, see all the time that women are actively looking to leave their roles, and they're not going to turn around and say it's because of X, Y, and Z. They're out.

So, I think it's a huge blind spot on that pay parity thing. It’s really important to get that right and to address it because there is a movement happening around the world to bring out pay transparency. People are finding out more and more that they’re not being paid the same.

From the pay gap point of view, again, I call it the opportunity gap because what we find over decades of research is diversity wins. Diverse teams outperform on virtually every business measure. That includes things like innovation, productivity, retention, and bottom-line metrics that lead to better organizational performance.

Yet there's this crazy disconnect where organizations still treat diversity as a nice-to-have or, and I think we're going to get on to this soon, that promoting diversity means dropping your standards or taking a step down. For some reason, embracing the second half of the population means that we have less opportunity, or that we’re just giving them those roles because they are women rather than considering they may actually be the best person for the job.

Those biases and discrepancies lead to gender conflict because it is a very fraught subject but also lead to underperforming companies and women leaving. Before I continue with my side of it, I’d love to know from you, what are some realistic, pragmatic everyday things that men can do to address pay gaps in your own teams? I know you’ve taken some fabulous actions, and we’ve talked about this before.

Jonathan: Yeah, I guess when I look at that from my personal view, there was one statement that kind of triggered me to take more action than what I’d done previously. It goes back to that "us or them" attitude that some people have around this sort of topic.

The statement was: Privilege isn’t the absence of hardship. A lot of people, when they think about the gender pay gap or someone being interviewed because they’re a woman, start to think about this advantage. Everyone in a senior management position has worked really hard to get to that point, but that doesn’t mean you don’t have some privileges.

Historically, I used to say, “I have this great privilege because if I look at a senior management team, I look like them all, especially in New Zealand.” Overweight, 40-year-old male—you fit right in. I can look at a management team and see myself in it. But, more importantly, others look at a management team and see me in it because I look and act like them. I happened to go to a private school, so I tick the boxes of what someone expects from someone in that role.

Being able to step back and go, Yes, I’ve had advantages. That’s not the sole reason I’m here, but it definitely helped, allows me to examine biases, whether conscious or unconscious, that have influenced decisions.

I’ve done some stuff that’s probably out there—far more than what anyone else can do. At the last company I worked at, I read quite a lot of research, and one study showed if you interview one woman and three men for a role, there’s a 90% chance you’ll choose the man. If you switch it around for females, it’s the same.

What we did was start by looking at our interview questions, standardizing them so everyone was asked the same things. Then we determined what the “right answer” should be for each question. That might sound stupid, but biases come into play in the CV process too. I’ve worked with people who look for achievements or avoid candidates with career gaps. I’d never be hired by those standards.

When I was at WayBeyond, we ensured equal male and female interviews for every role. The most eye-opening part was hiring people with terrible CVs—predominantly women—but then running standardized testing and interviewing. We ended up with a balanced workforce: 50% women in engineering and 50% men. The hiring process drove workforce diversity, not the other way around.

For instance, one cultural question someone had was: Which is better, Marvel or DC? I told them, “You can’t ask that. What’s the correct answer?!” That question limited cultural diversity, too, not just gender.

Nat: That’s so interesting. I wouldn’t know how to answer that either. I’ll post a link in the chat for everyone: Harvard has done an implicit bias test. Recognizing unconscious bias is key. It’s ingrained in everything we do—not our fault, just how our brains manage millions of inputs. But identifying bias lets us counteract it.

Nat: Before we move on, we got asked: Are females less inclined to negotiate salaries? Research shows no significant gender gap in negotiation—about 44-54% of people negotiate. But that still means 50% of the population isn’t negotiating. Equip yourself with tools for negotiation while we live under systems where negotiation matters. Preparation is key.

Jonathan: In my experience, women negotiate more than men, particularly in male-dominated workforces. People think women negotiate less, but that’s because there are more men in those roles.

Jonathan: Let me throw you a question, Nat. Does it matter whether bias is conscious or unconscious? And if so, is there a preference?

Nat: Yes, it matters. Unconscious bias can’t be challenged, but conscious bias can. Identifying unconscious biases, like in your hiring process, gives you the power to change.

For instance, executive presence—often cited as a lack for women—is based on undefined traits rooted in ancient ideals. When we leave room for imagination, bias slips in. Identifying it moves us away from us vs. them to let’s tackle this together. Diversity in decision-making processes helps challenge bias. It’s not just diversity that wins but the inclusion of diverse voices that truly matters.

Jonathan: I prefer conscious bias. If someone’s opinion is blatantly wrong, you can discuss it. Unconscious bias flies under the radar, making change difficult.

Jonathan: We’re out of time. Thanks, Nat, and thanks to everyone who joined us. There’ll be a recording online soon.

Nat: Thanks, everyone. Bye!

Jonathan: Bye.