The NZ Part Time POWER List Has Been Announced

Introducing the NZ Part Time Power List, the first list that celebrates employers and individuals that are changing the system by proving that you can build your career (and not sidestep it) through meaningful part time roles.

Initiated by Emma Mclean, founder of Works for Everyone, a working parent’s consultancy, the Part Time Power list features 25 New Zealanders working in senior leadership roles and in part time hours. The list profiles 23 women and 2 men working in powerful part time roles, making it possibly the first Power list with more women than men.

“I believe that for equity at home and at work, we need to measure more than the outcomes, we need to also measure the enablers,” Emma says. “And senior leadership part time roles are an enabler for closing the pay gap and smashing the motherhood penalty – a penalty named because only mothers pay it when they become parents”.

Emma has worked with NZ’s leading companies since establishing her business in 2019 following a corporate strategy career and has observed a common thread around parents and part time work. Parents often return to work after children in part time roles but find their career sidelined when they do so. They don’t get the juicy projects anymore; they feel guilt for leaving at 3pm and managers can assume they are not interested in a career anymore. And, as a parent, when you don’t feel like you are progressing, when you don’t feel it is worth it, it can be easy to offramp yourself out of the workforce.

These observations motivated Emma to create a Power List that would act as a provocation for employers to create meaningful and career building part time roles. “You can’t be what you can’t see, and now we can see it”, says Emma.

“We have the power list here that NZ really needs. It features job shares, 4 days a week, 30 hours a week and school hours roles. All of them senior leadership roles” says Mclean, who has herself experienced the motherhood penalty. “These are roles that do not see them relegated to the "b team" and roles that smash the thinking that part time roles mean that you are less committed to your career.”

The NZ Part Time Power List is a rich resource that profiles roles that include a Russell McVeagh Partner, two senior leaders at Kiwibank, PwC Partners that include a job share, a Managing Partner from DDB Group and One NZ’s AI Productivity Lead. The list details each Part Time Power Lister, their employer, their role, their working arrangement and most importantly in their own words, the difference that working part time has made to them.

© Scoop Media