He aha te mea nui o te ao? He tāngata, he tāngata, he tāngata!

This well-known whakatauki (proverb) asks the question “what is the most important thing in the world?” and answers, “it is people.” This wisdom deserves to be front-and-centre in all that we do.

We advocate for human rights to be applied to all people, not just a select few. We comment on the impact of policy decisions on people, reminding our MPs that they are the peoples’ representatives. The Board is also focusing on its people, by building a supportive team culture through training with LEAD, funded by the Lotteries Commission. We will be focusing on team building, and the roles and responsibilities of governance and leadership. We will then extend the training to other leaders in our organisation, with training in group dynamics, financial management and practical IT for branch presidents and Action Hub coordinating committees. We will provide more details are they are firmed up.

There is plenty of activity in the Safety, Health and Wellbeing Action Hub.

An exciting development coming up is contributing to the Women’s Health Strategy emerged from the Pae Ora (Healthy Futures) Bill. Submissions continue to be a constant activity: preparing presenting, and monitoring legislation progress afterwards and we are grateful to Raewyn Stone who leads this work. Recent and upcoming submissions include the Birth Injuries Bill, Improving Surrogacy Laws, the Sale and Supply of Alcohol Amendment Bill.

It is of cause for concern that at present there are so few women nominations for the upcoming Council elections in Palmerston North. At present there are seven women and eight men on the Council, but three women are not standing again for election this year. To highlight this issue, the National Council of Women (NCW) Manawatu Branch held a meeting on 3 July in the Palmerston North City Council library to encourage participation in the elections. 

Event panel members (l-r) Aleisha Rutherford, Lorna Johnson, Leone Hapeta, and Janine Rankin. Image from Anne McCarthy.

Every two years the National Council of Women partners with Research NZ to undertake a comprehensive survey of gender attitudes in Aotearoa New Zealand. Across the three surveys so far (2017, 2019 and 2021), up to 42% of the respondents indicated they believed that gender equality has for the most part been achieved in New Zealand. This grand statement deserves more scrutiny. For example, the male respondents tended to show they were more optimistic about this than the female respondents. What would one expect to see and/or experience if gender equality had been achieved? It's worth revisiting some of the results of the Gender Attitudes Survey 2021. 

Dr. Fiona Te Momo

Dr. Negar Partow

On the 18th of July, the NCWNZ Education Action Hub hosted two vibrant speakers informing members about gender gaps in New Zealand academia. They were Associate Professor Dr. Fiona Te Momo (lecturer at the School of Māori Knowledge), and Dr. Negar Partow (senior lecturer in Security Studies), both from Massey University, Albany, New Zealand. Both also chair Ethics Committees at their universities.

Negar explained that the gender gap in universities generally is hundreds of years old, since originally universities were structured for men’s needs (Perez, 2019). Today, in New Zealand, men have more than double the chance than women to be promoted to professor status from a similar research baseline and have a $400,000 lifetime gender pay gap. Women are cited and published less than men, are not being included in research, and women employees are often delegated to pastoral and service work (Brower & James, 2020; Walker, Sin, Macinnis-Ng, Hannah, & McAllister, 2020). Negar suggested that to improve, universities need to focus on blind hiring, distance themselves from centralising the power of hiring and promotion in middle management, work around the ‘glass ceiling,’ facilitate women’s opportunities for networking and institute an independent process for monitoring workload and promotion processes.

On July 4 2022, Betty Ofe-Grant (NCWNZ Board member), Joy Williams (President of Auckland NCW branch) and a few other Auckland NCW members attended the "Keep Earth Green with Love" event hosted by the Taiwanese Women’s Association of New Zealand (TWANZ), a national member organisation of the NCWNZ. TWANZ President Huang Mamei led the event which included Director Chen Yongshao and Founding President Chen Ziying.

Betty Loughhead wearing the korowai, Te Amo Oranga Nui Ki Te Ao, made by Whero Bailey (Te Atiawa) in 2003 with blue and gold feathers, the Soroptimist colours.

One of NCWNZ's organisational members is the Soroptimist International of Aotearoa New Zealand (SIANZ). Soroptimist International was founded in 1921 and its motto is "A Global Voice for Women."  According to their website: "The name Soroptimist was coined from the Latin soror meaning sister, and optima meaning best. And so Soroptimist is perhaps best interpreted as ‘the best for women’." The first Soroptimist club in New Zealand was chartered in Wellington in November 1939. Within ten years clubs were established in Auckland and Christchurch, and in 1978, the New Zealand clubs joined in the founding of the Federation of the South West Pacific (SISWP) with eleven other countries in the region. One of five Federations globally, SISWP recently changed its name to Soroptimist International South East Asia Pacific. This was to reflect the thirteen countries in their Federation. SIANZ club numbers are now 20 with the recent charter of a young club, Soroptimist International Rangatahi Wellington.

Betty Loughhead joined Soroptimist International of Christchurch in 1951 and held office at all levels. She served on the Conference of Clubs of which she was Chair in 1967-69 and was President of the Soroptimists Clubs of the South West Pacific 1980 – 82. She served as a member of the International Board from 1979 – 1983. It was about this time Betty moved to the Wellington club.

In 1983 Betty began her two year term as President, Soroptimist International. She was the first New Zealander to achieve this position and many New Zealand Soroptimists attended her inauguration in Istanbul.

From 1.00 – 3.00 am (not a misprint) on Tuesday 5 July, NCWNZ Parliamentary Watch Committee Convenor Beryl Anderson and President Suzanne Manning attended the UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) 84 Pre-Sessional Working Group hosted in Geneva, via Zoom. The meeting was chaired by Franceline Toé-Bouda, the committee member from Burkina Faso, who spoke in French. Translation was available (although it took both Suzanne and Beryl a while to find out how to access the translation).

The non-government organisations (NGOs) from countries who will be reporting to CEDAW in 2023 were attending to give an oral presentation in support of their written submissions on their List of Issues Prior to Reporting (LoIPR). These issues guide the CEDAW Monitoring Committee in their questioning of each country’s government during the reporting sessions. The LoIPR for Aotearoa New Zealand was formed collaboratively by NCWNZ with our organizational members and other women's organisations.

Kate Sheppard House. Image from GoogleMaps, 2021.

1888. Walter and Kate Sheppard built an eight-room kauri and slate-roofed villa on their two acres purchased in 1887. The address is 83 Clyde Road, and the village was built in a rural suburb of Christchurch called Fendalton. It was located on the same street as properties owned by Kate's brother Frank Malcolm and her sisters Isabel May and Marie Beath. Today, the suburb is now called Ilam, and the historic site borders the University of Canterbury.

1891. Kate began regularly reporting on the women's suffrage movement through the women's page in The Prohibitionist, published by the Sydenham Prohibition League. Since 1887 Kate had served as the national superintendent for the department of Franchise and Legislation for the Women's Christian Temperance Union of New Zealand – the first national organisation established by and run specifically by women. Together with her sister Isabel, she had been using her home as an office for their shared interests in women's rights activism.

1893. At her dining room table in this house, one of the women's suffrage petition rolls was pasted together before it was sent to the House of Representatives in Wellington. This particular roll contained almost 32,000 signatures. Here in the garden, Kate received a telegram on 19 September 1893 informing her of the reform of the Electoral Law in which women won the right to vote in general elections.

At the NCWNZ Conference 2022, Aleisha Amohia, NCWNZ Wellington Branch President (photo at right), presented an "Introduction to Te Tiriti o Waitangi" workshop. The workshop aimed to introduce Te Tiriti through a brief teaching of its history and articles, and offer a discussion for attendees to understand how it could be applied to our lives and mahi. Download the slides (.pdf file) here. Please contact Aleisha Amohia and/or Ashlee Metcalfe at [email protected] before sharing the slides with anyone else.

This session was in line with NCWNZ policy passed in 2018 to acknowledge and honour Te Tiriti o Waitangi:

2.11.3 That NCWNZ is committed to the rights and obligations articulated in Te Tiriti o Waitangi as the founding documents of Aotearoa. NCWNZ demonstrates a visible and tangible commitment to honouring the tikanga of tangata whenua and ensuring the fulfilment of rights and responsibilities of both Tiriti partners.

The text from the slides is reproduced below.