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Summary
- Aotearoa New Zealand has scored highly in the Trade Policy pillar of the global trade and gender policy benchmarking tool, SheTrades Outlook(external link), a project administered by the International Trade Centre.
- The tool compares data and policies on education, finance, innovation and trade policy amongst others, to support women’s participation in international trade.
- Aotearoa New Zealand scores highly as a result of work done consulting with stakeholders; analysing the impacts of FTAs on women; and the representation of women in strategic roles.
- The Outlook also includes case studies of initiatives supporting women’s participation in trade, in which we reported on the Global Trade and Gender Arrangement (GTAGA), NZTE’s Women in Export Leadership work, and MFAT’s work linking data sets to better understand New Zealand women’s involvement in exporting.
Report
What is SheTrades?
Established in 1964, the International Trade Centre (ITC) is the joint agency of the WTO and the UN. ITC is the only international development agency fully dedicated to supporting micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) to enable them to benefit from trade. Its SheTrades Initiative is largely an Aid-for-Trade initiative designed to support women from developing countries to engage in international trade as entrepreneurs and exporters. Sitting within this project, the SheTrades Outlook is a data and policy tool designed to assess, monitor and improve how the institutional ecosystem supports women's participation in international trade, across both developed and developing countries.
The intended audience of SheTrades Outlook are policymakers, researchers, and NGOs to assist them in unlocking markets for women by identifying and eliminating obstacles in the policy ecosystem. At present, 44 countries from Asia, Africa, Europe, North and South America, and the Pacific have joined and submitted data.
What do the results say about us?
The Outlook has six pillars: Trade Policy, Legal and Regulatory Framework, Business Environment, Access to Skills, Access to Finance, and Work and Society. New Zealand ranked above the world average in Trade Policy, Work and Society, and Legal and Regulatory Framework, with our highest score in the Trade Policy pillar. Reflecting our Trade for All approach, as well as recent work such as the OECD’s ‘Trade and Gender Review of New Zealand’, these high marks came from our results on impact assessments of trade, consultation processes, and women’s representation in strategic roles.
Interestingly, the reason New Zealand ranked below world average in the other three pillars was predominantly due to the lack of collection of some gender-disaggregated data. In New Zealand, certain data indicators are not collected, or collected in a different way than SheTrades asks for. This results in New Zealand ranking low for indicators like education drop out ratios, national numeracy tests, as well as internet and mobile usage. These low rankings belie the fact that New Zealand actually does much better than many of the other SheTrades countries who received higher marks on these indicators.
Some of our lower scores are also due to a lack of quotas or specific interventions to assist women. The reason we do not have these requirements is probably because we already enjoy high representation of women in these areas, i.e. we lost a point for not having a gender quota for parliament - but the New Zealand Parliament currently has 60 female MPs and 59 male MPs.
These show that the purpose of the Outlook is for the most part about mapping countries’ policy ecosystems to identify where policies supporting women do and do not exist, and as they put it, “prioritise areas where adjusting interventions are crucial to achieve better results”. In this way, “what get measured gets done”.
Case Studies
The SheTrades Outlook also requires participating countries to submit short case studies (called “Good Practices”) outlining a specific policy or initiative that supports women’s participation in trade. Each Good Practice provides background about the policy or project, key success factors, challenges, achievements, and links to more information.
The Good Practices are categorised into 10 topics, focused on most common barriers that women face when participating in trade. The topics are access to skills; access to finance; policies, laws and regulations that support women in trade; access to networks; access to markets; tailored support for enterprises; internal practices; advocacy; collection of gender disaggregated data; and public procurement.
New Zealand submitted three Good Practices. The first outlined NZTE’s work supporting women-led companies, specifically through the InvestHer Showcase and Women in Export Leadership. InvestHer is a platform for women-led companies to raise investment by pitching their ideas to investors, and includes coaching beforehand to develop and deliver their pitches. Women in Export Leadership involves networking events for women exporters with the purpose of sharing knowledge and experiences in participating in trade.
Our second Good Practice focused on the Global Trade and Gender Arrangement (GTAGA) of which New Zealand, Canada, Chile, Mexico, Colombia, and Peru are Members. The GTAGA commits each participant to advance a more inclusive approach to trade, particularly by tackling the barriers that women face, and includes cooperation activities.
The final Good Practice submitted covered the work done by MFAT(external link) linking data from different sources to help provide a comprehensive snapshot of New Zealand’s goods exporting firms and creating gender-disaggregated trade data. The Good Practice outlined how this data analysis was undertaken and some of the findings from this research, such as the underrepresentation of women in goods exporting firms relative to their overall labour force participation.
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Disclaimer
This information released in this report aligns with the provisions of the Official Information Act 1982. The opinions and analysis expressed in this report are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the views or official policy position of the New Zealand Government. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade and the New Zealand Government take no responsibility for the accuracy of this report.