A raft of rather shocking insights have come out of a recent study, concerning how Kiwis feel about gender equality in NZ. You might want to sit down and pour yourself a chamomile tea (or maybe grab a pillow to scream into?) to read these ones…
- One in five New Zealanders don’t think gender equality is a fundamental right
- Nearly half of New Zealanders think gender equality has already been achieved
- One in three young men in NZ believe gender equality has gone too far
- 40% of New Zealanders no longer see sexism as a significant issue
- 40% of men and 27% of women believe false rape accusations are common
– Aotearoa New Zealand Gender Attitudes Survey 2025
When Capsule saw some of these shocking statistics, we thought it was important to dig in further. So we spoke to Suzanne Manning from the National Council of Women NZ (NCWNZ) – Te Kaunihera Wāhine o Aotearoa. It leads the Gender Equal NZ movement, whose fifth Gender Attitudes Survey – in tandem with Research NZ – gives us a biennial snapshot of where we’re at in Aotearoa on gender equity. This is a quantitative not qualitative survey – as in, they ask questions, but don’t ask the reasons behind the answers (if anyone wants to fund some qualitative research, let Suzanne know!).
A 130-year-old organisation that sprang from the suffrage movement, the NCWNZ is still working towards gender equality in Aotearoa, with around 200 individuals and 50 organisations under its umbrella, working in 11 branches, and six action hubs. As its president, Suzanne has a top-down and grass-roots perspective on what’s happening with gender equity. And, well, it’s… not great.
“Certainly we’re not seeing the sort of steady progress we hoped for with gender equality. We do all this work to change things – there’s the #metoo movement and Jacinda Ardern as Prime Minister – and they become little blips.” Not to mention the recent termination of pay-equity claims. It’s incredibly frustrating that women took so long to gain more equality, and now it feels it’s being eroded quite quickly, right? “Yes, we were actually quite optimistic not so long ago, and now it feels like it’s slipping away.”
So we need to change attitudes. “And attitudes are notoriously difficult to change. Part of the reason we do this Gender Attitudes Survey is to hold up a mirror to society. And to highlight minority views, because otherwise it’s easy for people to assume that everybody agrees with them, so they don’t need to do anything about something like gender equality.” You could call them our blind spots.
Gender equality is…. already here?
The survey shows that 52% of men and 41% of women think gender equality has for the most part been achieved, up from 30% of New Zealanders in 2017. Why the big jump? “I’m not actually sure. But I once saw some research that said, when 30% of a film cast are women, people tend to think it’s gender-balanced.” The same goes for three women with seven men in a boardroom. “People are sensitive to change – but not necessarily to the actual proportions or statistics.”
“So, some people say we’ve got gender equality. But I’ve just voted for the [Wellington] local-body elections and the regional council, and I had a choice of men, men and men. Because a lot of female publicly-elected representatives – including MPs and some mayors – are leaving service, citing online abuse as contributing. It’s getting worse and it’s mercilessly disproportionate towards women. At local-government level, we know women who won’t put themselves forward because of that.”
The survey shows three-quarters of New Zealanders recognise online harassment is a serious problem here, and 62% of us think women are exposed to more harassment online than men. Also, 74% of women, and 69% of men, believe online harassment affects how women are treated in real life. Glad we can mainly agree on that!
Men are… disadvantaged by gender inequality?
The survey asked which groups are disadvantaged by gender inequality: women generally, specific groups of women (for example, women of colour, LBQTIA+ women, and women with disabilities), specific groups of men, men generally, or no groups. Nearly one in five men think specific groups of men are disadvantaged by gender inequality, and 11% of males think men generally are disadvantaged by gender inequality. Yes, really. Also, more than one in five men felt no groups are disadvantaged by gender inequality. Meanwhile, almost half of women (but only a third of men) identified women generally as a group disadvantaged because of gender inequality.
“When you work in the gender-equality space,” Suzanne says, “you keep getting told by men that that they’re being disadvantaged by all this. When people, who often don’t recognise their own privilege, see their privileges being eroded, they say ‘that’s unfair’. They don’t look around to say, ‘well, other people are living with that unfairness’.”
Another shocking finding: 45% of men no longer see sexism as a significant issue in Aotearoa – and one in three women agree. “They might think ‘there’s a wee bit of sexism, but it’s not that big an issue’ because it doesn’t impact them personally.”
Here’s a sharp gender divide: 60% of men – compared to 35% of women – said gender equality has been achieved in the health system. Men, how the heck would you know?
Gender equality has… gone too far?
Is there good news? Well, Suzanne says we can celebrate that four in five New Zealanders think gender equality is a fundamental right. “But also, 21% of New Zealanders don’t think that it is. Maybe they think gender equality is important but not a fundamental right, but even so, that’s quite a substantial minority. So what’s holding us back? One thing is that one in three young men think gender equality has gone too far.” That’s one in three males aged 18 to 34. “That gets us thinking about what these young men are thinking and being exposed to.”
Does she think there’s been any trickle-down effect from the U.S. with the gutting of DEI initiatives and the ‘manosphere’?
“The U.S. is loud and vocal, but these things are also happening elsewhere including the U.K. and in Australia. The pushback against gender equality – and progressive attitudes in general – is a global pushback.” The UN Commission on the Status of Women held its annual summit in March to examine gender equality. “Our representatives came back from that saying everybody was talking about this political and social pushback against gender-equality initiatives and the idea that gender equality has gone too far.”
“We don’t have much control over the global pushback, but other things are within our control. Young people, in general, imbibe their family’s values, then peer values – and once they’re young adults, they’ve got some fixed, firm views of how the world works. That’s psychology – and this is my opinion: over the years you find out the world doesn’t work quite in the rigid fashion that you thought at age 20. So with these young men, what has their family upbringing been like? What has their schooling been like? That’s a chance to intervene.”
What are schools teaching young people?
The New Zealand curriculum has compulsory relationships and sexuality education (RSE), and the government is finally considering making consent education compulsory within this. But it’s not all good news. “We’re concerned there’s a political will to strip the RSE curriculum of gender talk. We have no problem with things being reviewed or refined, but we need proper conversations about it.”
The Gender Attitudes Survey shows a fifth of New Zealanders think gender diversity shouldn’t be taught in schools. Should teaching about gender equality and gender diversity be compulsory? “We want it to be mandatory. But it’s a politically fraught area, so schools consult and parents are allowed to opt out. Also, this shouldn’t just be a one- or two-month module at Year 10. There need to be other conversations through schools because not everybody can talk to their parents. Yes, the U.S. manosphere can influence where young men get their information – but that tends to happen with their peers within school.”
“So we have to ask: who’s conversing with our young men at school, in tertiary education, in employment? What role models are they getting? What messages are they getting about how to ‘be a man’? There’s this message that you have to be staunch, independent and do it alone. No, you don’t. Young men need support, and they need to be shown that this is a collaborative world.”
Sexual harm
We also need to have some difficult conversations about rape. On one hand, the survey shows that the percentage of those who agree with rape myths continues to be relatively low and are seeing little change over time. The exception is that New Zealanders’ agreement with the statement that ‘rape happens when a man’s sex drive is out of control’ has risen from 25% in 2017 to 36% in 2025. The kicker? 35% of women believe this.
The survey also shows 19% of men and 14% of women think that, if someone’s raped when drunk, they’re at least partly responsible for what happens. Plus, 15% of men, and 8% of women, think you can’t really call it rape if someone doesn’t physically fight back. Holy heck – young people really need that RSE education.
What’s more, 40% of men think false rape accusations are common. Yes, really. “There’s often the thought,” Suzanne says, “that good men could be destroyed by a false rape complaint. I mean, false complaints exist. But they don’t happen often. It goes back to men making themselves the victims in a situation where they’re not generally the victims. What concerns me even more is that 27% of women believe false rape accusations are common.”
As for reproductive rights, 30% of men and 22% of women in NZ think women shouldn’t have the right to choose an abortion. That’s often influenced by religion. Could that also be influenced by what’s happened in the U.S., I ask? “Possibly because it’s been in the news more. We changed our laws around abortion a few years ago to remove it from the Crimes Act and put it into a health context. And no, we haven’t been overrun with huge spikes in abortions. Nobody is openly suggesting we revisit that law, so those gains in attitudes are pretty solid. But people have always fluctuated on their attitude to abortion in general, and there’s been so much news coming from the States, that I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s giving people permission to voice anti-abortion opinions at the moment.”
People are certainly voicing their opinions about the gutting of equal-pay claims. “A lot of effort went into the Equal Pay Amendment Bill Act 2020, then groups [from different professions] were working on those pay-equity claims. Even if there was a consensus that some things about the legislation should be improved, there could have been incremental improvements. Instead the approach was to stop everything, and basically wipe all that work.”
Suzanne’s unhappy about the government passing the legislation under urgency with no chance for public submissions. “The right for women to have a say in politics and democracy in the public sphere is, as a principle, something the NCWNZ holds dearly. The suffragists knew there was more to do, and we know that too. Short-term wins are lovely, but they’re easily lost and we’re here for the long haul.”
See the full report here