CLOSING THE GENDER PAY GAP

VALERIE LOVE

‘Those events do strike me in a way that they may not strike a man.’

DESCRIPTION ‘Women Performing an Interpretive Dance About the Gender Pay Gap’, 2019

MAKER / ARTIST Sharon Murdoch (b. 1960)

REFERENCE New Zealand Cartoon and Comics Archive (DCDL-0040018) This digital cartoon is from the New Zealand Cartoon and Comics Archive, one of the Turnbull Library’s treasuries of graphic art.

In 2019, a report by the New Zealand Council of Trade Unions highlighted the discrepancy in wages between men and women in Aotearoa New Zealand. It estimated that closing the pay gap at the current rate of action would take 100 years, leaving women to wait to earn the same as their male counterparts until 2119.

Sharon Murdoch’s cartoon ‘Women Performing an Interpretive Dance About the Gender Pay Gap’ was published in response to the report. It depicts four women contorting themselves to spell out the number 2119. The cartoon notes that the 11.9 per cent pay imbalance of men over women in 2019 meant women were essentially working for free from 18 November through to the end of the year. The pay inequity is even worse for Māori and Pasifika women, with Māori women working for free from 12 October (22.1 per cent pay gap), and Pasifika women from 29 September (25.5 per cent pay gap).

By showing the four women twisting themselves into various uncomfortable postures to spell out the year 2119, the cartoon illustrates the often untenable positions in which women find themselves in the workplace.

Murdoch (Ngāi Tahu, English) is the first woman to regularly produce political cartoons for New Zealand mainstream media. She has won the New Zealand Cartoonist of the Year award three times, in 2016, 2017 and 2018. Her cartoons regularly feature social justice themes and highlight inequality in contemporary Aotearoa. As a satirist, she aims to focus on injustice as well as the absurd to draw attention to societal issues that are otherwise easily ignored.

Murdoch’s first cartoon was published in the Waikato Times in 2013. She specifically used her masculinesounding surname as a moniker for her cartoons to break into New Zealand’s male-dominated cartooning landscape. She is also the creator of the Munro the Cat cartoon puzzles.

In her 2016 book Murdoch: The Cartoons of Sharon Murdoch, she says, ‘One of the most important decisions that a political cartoonist makes is their choice of subjects. I don’t always choose events that specifically affect women, but those events do strike me in a way that they may not strike a man.’