Gender pay-gap expert Professor Gail Pacheco receives NZIER Economics Award for 2018

The NZIER Economics Award for 2018 was presented to Professor Gail Pacheco of the Auckland University of Technology at NZIER’s AGM & dinner on 28 August 2018.

Gail has made a huge contribution to economics in New Zealand over many years and her work stands out for its diversity, quantity and quality. Her work covered inter-generational welfare effects, gender education as both a driver and an outcome, industry structures, culture, job satisfaction and well-being measures, health as it relates to employment, health system service delivery, and ethnic disparities.

Her guidelines that assist workplaces to address the gender pay-gap stood out to the independent awarding panel.

“A career highlight was jointly launching the gender pay gap research conducted for the Ministry for Women last year with the then-deputy prime minister”, said Gail in her acceptance speech.

Read the award citation here.

About the NZIER Economics Award
The recipient of the NZIER Economics Award is selected by an independent panel and sponsored by NZIER. The 2018 Awarding Panel included:

• Reserve Bank Governor nominee: John McDermott (Assistant Governor)
• Treasury Secretary nominee: Tim Ng (Deputy Secretary & Chief Economic Adviser at The Treasury)
• NZAE president: Professor Mark Holmes (Lincoln University)
• Business Representative: Catherine Beard (Export NZ)
• Academic Representative: Veronica Jacobsen (MBIE).

The NZIER Economic Award’s Operating Guidelines instruct the Awarding Panel to “look for outstanding contributions to the advancement of economics and its applications in New Zealand”. To qualify for the Award a contribution “must advance economic matters of direct relevance to New Zealand”, and must be “likely to be of long-term lasting importance to New Zealand”.