Kiwis Want Gender Equality But Survey Warns New Zealand Risks Falling Short
New Zealanders overwhelmingly want gender equality, but Te Kaunihera Wāhine o Aotearoa National Council of Women of New Zealand’s latest Gender Attitudes Survey shows that any progress we’ve achieved in the last 132 years since universal suffrage risks being slowed by complacency, harmful attitudes, and government actions that run counter to public demand.
NCWNZ, alongside Rangahau Aotearoa Research New Zealand, has been monitoring attitudes to gender in Aotearoa New Zealand since 2017 as part of our longitudinal Gender Attitudes survey.
The 2025 survey results highlight strong consensus across Aotearoa that New Zealanders want gender equality to be achieved:
- 79% believe gender equality is a fundamental right
- 78% say achieving equality would mean equal pay for women and men
- 67% believe equality would mean more women in senior management.
Despite the historical progress in Aotearoa, we are still falling short of achieving our equality goals. NCWNZ President Dr Suzanne Manning says, “Our survey is telling us that having equality for all genders is important to us, but some attitudes Kiwis have are holding us back – and pushback from smaller groups is reversing our forward progress in some key areas.”
Importantly, some results indicate a mistaken belief that gender equality has been achieved already. The survey also reveals worrying complacency and a concerning backward trend on what progress should look like:
- 46% of New Zealanders think equality has already been achieved
- 1 in 3 young men (18–34) believe equality has gone too far
- 40% no longer see sexism as a significant issue
- 17% of New Zealanders think that if someone is raped when they’re drunk they’re at least partly responsible for it
- 11% of people think that if someone doesn’t physically fight back you can’t call it rape
- Agreement that “it’s understandable for a man to hit out when his partner tries to leave” has risen from 8% (2017) to 14% (2025).
“If we believe gender equality has been achieved, we’re unlikely to prioritise actions that must be sustained to make true progress,” Dr Manning said. “This is made worse when our country’s leaders make crucial decisions on pay equity, women’s health, education and climate policy that disproportionately affect women and which set us back decades on the progress we’ve already made.”
Earlier this year, the government passed the Equal Pay Amendment Bill, which cancelled more than 33 active pay equity claims covering over 150,000 workers, including teachers, librarians, care workers, and administration staff. The new law also makes it far harder to bring future claims, raising workforce thresholds, restricting comparators, and phasing in pay adjustments over years.
NCWNZ is not going to simply stand by and watch this happen.
“When our government signals it will endorse actions and legislation that devalue women’s contributions to society, gender equality is going to go backwards. NCWNZ is not going to simply stand by and watch this happen,” Manning said. “We need our leaders to know that they must work harder to deliver what is important to the majority of the people they represent.
“This survey is strongly telling us what kind of future New Zealanders want. The findings underscore an urgent need to re-engage all Kiwis – and young people in particular – in the conversation about equality. We need to ensure that their voices are heard about the country they want to live in.”
For more information on the 2025 Gender Attutudes Survey, visit genderequal.nz/ga-survey.
For media enquiries, contact Dr Suzanne Manning at [email protected], or call 022 655 6512.
Showing 8 reactions
Firstly, we focused on the results of a survey made in 2017 on the issue of gender equality. We noticed that New-Zealanders wanted a more equalitarian society, that would be stronger. . This survey generally emphasizes several notions, as consent or even education. For instance, most of the population want age-appropriate education about gender diversity in schools. Nonetheless, there was still progress to make, indeed 19% of New-zealanders don’t agree that girls are as smart as boys.
Then, we studied another survey that was made 3 years later. Whereas Lisa Lawrence, the president of the national council, was hopeful regarding the evolution of equality, she was disappointed to see that not only were the results were quite similar that in 2017 but also that a feeling of complacency took place. Indeed, the fact that the New-Zealand prime minister was a woman convinced the people that total equality was achieved : indeed, 42% of the population think that gender equality had been achieved. Thus, this survey seems to reveal that progress was going backward.
Finally, the last document we have seen is that web site where the survey regarding the gender attitude called us to mind. Indeed, some results just like “1 in 3 young men (18–34) believe equality has gone too far” this stats shows that New Zealanders want to improve gender equality but that the reality is much more different because some stats show the increase of antiprogressive ideas concerning gender attitude.
To conclude, we can say that even if New-Zealand’s culture is based upon equality and progressive policy, complacency can be a real danger for gender equality in lots of domains. We think as French students that gender equality should be more taught in schools, in order to make people understand as soon as possible the importance of equality in our society.
In fact, the survey in the article shows that 40% of the population no longer see sexism as a significant issue. New Zealanders may think they already have reached a complacent state of gender equality which explain the increase of people thinking that equality has been achieved. So according to another article we studied from stuff.co.nz by Josephine FRANKS in 2020 a survey from 2019 we see that between this time and 2025 attitudes towards gender equality have become more contradictory: while support for equality remains high in theory, more Kiwis now believe that equality has already been achieved (46% in 2025 compared with 42% in 2019). Which suggests growing complacency.
Moreover, we find some results worrying, there is 17% thinking that a drunk raped victim is partly responsible for it and even 11% think that it’s not considered as rape if the victim doesn’t fight back physically. Those results suggests that equality is still incomplete and requires continued awareness and action. Having strong women as representatives was not enough New Zealand should not rest on it’s laurel and need to keep striving for gender equality.
We are a group of French students and we worked on New Zealand, and especially about gender equality in your country. In France, gender equality is way less advanced than in your country.
For example, in France, men earn 20% more than women for the same job.
We also study your gender equality survey of 2017, 2019 and 2025. When we first looked at your 2017 survey, we were pleasantly surprised. The high rate of people thinking that gender equality is primordial is nice to see.
But after a closer look at your 2025 survey, we noticed that some major problems were still there. For example, 11% of people think that if someone doesn’t physically fight back you can’t call it rape or 17% think that if a person is drunk when she’s being raped she’s in part responsible for it.
In a nutshell, we admire your country for all the great accomplishments you have achieved. But we agree that there is still work to do. Educating people on the problems of gender inequalities is very important.
From our perspective, when reading this survey, we believed it was scary to find that many New Zealanders don’t really consider consent as it was revealed that 17% agree that a person who is drunk is partly responsible for being sexually assaulted and 14% agree that it can be understandable for a man to hit his partner if she is trying to leave him.
Moreover, compared to the 2017 survey, some people, especially young men, believe that equality has “gone too far” and fewer recognise sexism as a serious problem. This suggests that while support for equality exists in theory, complacency and resistant attitudes have increased, showing real progress.
On the other hand, we noticed the effort you’ve put on gender pay equality. New Zealanders say that gender equality is a fundamental right, and support for ideas like equal pay has grown. However, there is also a growing belief that gender equality has already been achieved: by 2025, nearly half of the population thinks the issue is essentially solved. Still, we took note of the fact that 79% of New Zealanders say that gender equality is a fundamental human right and 46% believe that gender equality has already been achieved. While around one in five people still do not consider gender equality to be a fundamental right (which is unchanged since 2017). It shows a high level of complacency.
It looks as if New Zealand and its inhabitants still have work to do on several domains such as the world of work, and consent, even though some of them have already increased, with the equal pay act for instance.
Yet, according to a 2025 article, 40% of New Zealanders no longer see sexism as a significant issue. This is a high proportion, almost representing a majority of the population. This suggests a growing sense of complacency, as many New Zealanders appear to believe that gender equality has already been achieved and therefore no longer requires serious attention. Moreover, the 2025 article reveals several inconsistencies.
For instance, while 79% of respondents believe that gender equality is a fundamental right, one in three young men aged 18 to 34 think that gender equality has gone too far. A comparison of attitudes between 2017 and 2025 also highlights worrying contradictions. In 2017, 88% of New Zealanders supported education focused on healthy relationships and consent. However, in 2025, 17% believe that if someone is raped while drunk, they are at least partly responsible, and 11% think that if a victim does not physically fight back, it cannot be considered rape.
These results are particularly shocking and worrying, as they reveal a clear gap between the values New Zealanders claim to support and the attitudes that still persist regarding sexism and sexual violence.
As you wrote, gender equality is going to go backwards so, we also think that you need to re-engage all Kiwis and young people, in particular, in the conversation, and raise awareness child at school about equality in order to live in a more progressive country.