Judy Mcgregor

Auckland University of Technology | AUT · School of Social Sciences and Public Policy Research

This article argues that neoliberalism with its pervasive patriarchy and co-option of feminism, renders women tacitly complicit in gendered pay inequalities. We show that in New Zealand, one of the world’s most neoliberal nations, women who might precisely be best equipped to argue for equal pay – engineers – do not do so because neoliberalism make...

The gender pay gap of higher paid women working in traditionally male-dominated sectors has received less analysis in equal pay research than low paid, female-dominated and undervalued women’s work. This article explores equal pay from the perspectives of female engineers, well paid women working in a Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematic...

Fighting complacency and retrogression: Re-awakening gender equality activism in New Zealand. New Zealand enjoys an impressive reputation for gender equality. It was the first self- governing nation to grant women’s suffrage in 1893 and scores highly in international indexes such as the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap at sixth of 135 coun...

Fighting complacency and retrogression: reawakening gender equality activism. New Zealand enjoys an impressive reputation for gender equality. It was the first self-governing nation to grant women's suffrage in 1893 and scores highly in international indexes such as the World Economic Forum's Global Gender Gap at sixth out of 135 countries. In rec...

This article explores the paradox of New Zealand's officially expressed commitment to the fundamental human right of gender equality internationally, despite the lack of progress in the implementation of equal pay and pay equity for low paid female workers domestically. New research funded by the New Zealand Law Foundation is assessing the impact o...

Human capital for the "knowledge economy" has curiously been a Cinderella topic for applied business research. This paper reports on a survey of New Zealand small and medium enterprises and is part of a wider Government-funded new economy sector analysis. The study, which utilised both a quantitative survey and qualitative theory development, exami...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to consider the following questions: who needs gender? Can there possibly be any intelligence left to share? What is the role of gender researchers in 2010 and in the twenty‐first century? Design/methodology/approach This reflective piece considers these issues against the author's own personal experience as Ge...

Purpose Changes to government policy, deregulation and corporatization in New Zealand have influenced the number and status of women on boards of directors. Using company records, archival material and interviews, this paper seeks to examine gender equity on boards of directors in New Zealand and compare the progress of women on the boards of corpo...

The burgeoning literature about the knowledge economy has marginalised its most important dimension – people. The development of human capital and its role in the competitive advantage of business is discussed in relation to the changed nature of the employment relationship. In particular Drucker's concerns about the threat to business of attenuate...

This article compares two New Zealand surveys conducted in 2000: one of workers aged 55 years and over, and one of employers. The issue of older workers captured respondents’ attention, with both studies receiving response rates of around 50%. The congruence of attitudes among older workers and employers regarding the efficacy of negative HRD stere...

A dramatic acceleration in “girl power” predicted for the boardrooms of major New Zealand business is examined against the notion that age is a traditional demographic variable influencing board selection. For example, the average age of directors in Canada and the USA is 59 years, with 56 per cent of Canadian directors over 60 years. The paper exa...

The contribution of female small business owners to economic development in Western developed countries such as New Zealand, Australia, the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada, is generally under–researched and traditionally grounded in male norms. Increasingly policy–makers acknowledge that in countries like New Zealand where 85% of busin...

Journalism faces a crisis of faith, pressured by technological change, market forces and its own loss of confidence. Journalism must reassess its fundamental tenets. This paper modernises an important aspect of journalism theory, news values. Galtung and Ruge's (1965) twelve factors define the conditions that had to be present to heighten the proba...

Social prejudice about older people in society is expressed in a variety of discriminatory stereotypes. This paper explores the nature of stereotypes held by a large group of older workers and by employers in New Zealand. The empirical study shows that older workers aged 55 years and over who are members of New Zealand's largest union and employers...

Since Schein’s evocative and enduring metaphor "think manager – think male" there has been a stream of literature discussing gender difference in managerial style. The newer literature about managerial competence, however, remains largely silent about gender, regardless of whether managerial competence is contextualised in an organizational or a hu...

Press constructions of the appointment of a female to New Zealand’s top corporate position are examined against the theory that women are “symbolically annihilated” by the news media. A study of press clippings shows that news was framed primarily around gender and age and that questions about marital status and child-rearing devalued and trivialis...

Supporters of public journalism hope to reengage citizens with politics and overcome the shortcomings of contemporary political journalism. However, there has been little systematic study of how public journalism differs from mainstream journalism. During the 1996 general election campaign in New Zealand, the first under proportional representation...

This paper presents the findings of a three-year study of the ability of manufacturing SMEs to take up new or improved technologies and use them effectively in their efforts to innovate. Based on empirical fieldwork, an integrated model that covers a broad range of factors that influence technology uptake in manufacturing SMEs has been developed. T...

The promise of public journalism is that it makes politics “go well.” However, empirical evaluation of it has been fragmentary. The introduction of a new electoral system in New Zealand saw the print media experiment with the new model. In our study, we examined the journalistic interpretation of election campaign issues under the new circumstances...

The rise of corporatisation poses a new challenge for equal opportunities as women struggle to participate in corporate governance. Traditionally, the corporate model was confined to the private sector which is now strongly driven by a prevailing ideology of economic de-regulation. A consequence of laissez faire economics is that the private sector...

While the absence of female directors on corporate boards in New Zealand is controversial, little is known about the first wave of women in boardrooms in the private sector. This benchmark study, a questionnaire survey, provides the first demographic data about females in the boardrooms of the top 200 companies. The findings show that only 4.4 per...

The 1990's see the managerial woman in a transition phase in her quest for equality in employment. As Still (1993) suggests, a tension associated with this transition is that of conquering traditional and enduring organisational and attitudinal barriers while responding to new employment opportunities as organisations re-vision in response to globa...

Changes to government policy, deregulation and corporatization in New Zealand have influenced the number and status of women on boards of directors. Using company records, archival material and interviews, examines gender equity on boards of directors in New Zealand and compares the progress of women on the boards of corporate companies in the priv...

The impact of the deregulation of New Zealand's labour market on women is seriously under-researched and to date available scholarship tends to concentrate on collective bargaining with little written about the effects of deregulation on women in management. The Employment Contracts Act 1991 was presented by supporters as offering women more flexib...

Ever since Tuchman (1978) popularised the notion of "symbolic annihilation" to examine sexism in the media, a large scholarship has quantified and qualified the news media's sins against women. Is there any evidence that as women's political power has increased, their media representation has similarly improved? This paper answers this question wit...