Devalued By Design: The Pay Equity Conversation
Originally posted on The Cosmic Anthropologist Substack
TW: Includes reference to sexual violence and institutional harm.
The New Zealand Government’s decision to repeal pay equity law has sparked rightful backlash, made notably without democratic due diligence. But beyond the headlines and the obvious disappointment in leadership, a deeper question rises. One that has been lingering beneath the surface of our institutions, our work culture, and our very sense of self for generations.
Because this moment, regardless of the coalition Government’s intent, exposes something far more insidious than law reversal. It shines a light on the underlying architecture of how undervalued women, and the work traditionally associated with women, still are. Not just in terms of paycheques, but in terms of worth, contribution, and basic societal respect.
This isn’t just about equity on paper. It’s about the stories we tell ourselves about value, and the systems that reinforce those stories every single day. Which leads to the real question: What is valuable? What is worthy? And who gets to decide?
This wouldn’t be one of my newsletters without bringing in the moon, so let’s set the astrological scene. Today, we’re under the Scorpio Full Moon at 22° and it’s a reckoning that is emotional, karmic, and systemic. Scorpio governs the hidden, the unspeakable, the places we exile our grief and our power. And at this critical degree, what’s been buried rises to be felt, grieved, or transmuted.
This is a purge point. A truth-telling moon. One that asks: What pain have we normalised? And what power becomes available when we finally stop pretending it doesn’t hurt? This isn’t healing for comfort. This is healing for liberation.
Which brings me to something I’ve been holding in the shadows for far too long.
Two years and some change ago, I was raped by a man in the tech industry. Whisper who, it doesn’t matter anymore. What matters is what happened next, or more accurately, what didn’t.
What happens when someone in your community is deeply wounded? Not just physically or emotionally bruised, but spiritually gutted? You’d hope the answer would be: they’re held, supported, and protected. But under patriarchy and capitalism, where productivity and profits are prioritised above all else, and community has been replaced with corporate branding and reputational management, that kind of care becomes impossible.
What I experienced instead was a kind of institutional indifference. A quiet, calculated agreement to move on. To keep things tidy, to protect the system, not the person.
That experience shattered something, and it ripped the veil clean off. The illusion of progressiveness and innovation I’d been sold on was gone. I saw how unsafe and backwards the corporate world really is. And that’s why this repeal of pay equity law cuts so deep. Because it’s not just about money. It’s about what and who we believe matters in our society.
The repeal isn’t a glitch in the system. It’s the system doing exactly what it was designed to do: protect power, prioritise capital, and devalue care.
And this isn’t just about my story. And it’s not about one bad actor, or one company, or one incident. It’s about the patterns and the architecture. The thousands of women across thousands of industries who’ve experienced this same betrayal in different forms. It’s about teachers, nurses, carers, support staff; the people doing the life-sustaining, relational, and emotional work who are told every day, through policy, culture, and pay, that what they do is somehow less. Less skilled, less valuable and less important.
And here’s the part I don’t think we’ve fully sat with: In a patriarchal capitalist system, the very things that keep society functioning (nurture, care, healing, and emotional intelligence) are systematically devalued because they don’t generate immediate profit. And because those things are so often gendered, it becomes not just economic violence, but gendered violence.
So yes, the repeal is outrageous, but it’s also revealing. It’s a crack in the structure, and it’s showing us what’s always been there. And now that we see it, the question becomes: What do we do with that truth?
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Holistic ReDesign: The 3.5% Theory
In the spirit of Scorpio’s medicine (truth, transformation, and the alchemy of shadow), I want to turn toward what change could actually look like. Because we don’t want to just rage, we also need to rebuild, and we need frameworks that can hold both vision and practicality.
One of my favourites is the 3.5% Rule.
The research is simple but profound: when just 3.5% of a population engages in sustained and nonviolent action, social and political change becomes not only possible, but probable.
Let’s run the numbers:
New Zealand: ~5 million → 3.5% = 175,000 people
Auckland: ~1.76 million → 3.5% = 61,600 people
Tech workforce (2023 est.): ~120,000 → 3.5% = 4,200 people
These aren’t unreachable goals. They’re deeply human numbers. Change doesn’t require the whole system to shift at once. It requires a critical mass of people acting in integrity, consistently, together.
And so I began thinking about what this theory means across three key spheres: business, society, and the self.
In Business: Scaling Meaningfully
When I first entered the tech world, I was sold the gospel of scale, reach, valuations, and exit strategies. I went to Hong Kong in 2019 to pitch my water metering project with that same mindset: how many homes, how much revenue, how quickly we could grow.
But I’m not that person anymore. Or rather, I’ve remembered a deeper version of myself. Today, I’m far more interested in resonant reach than market share. I’d rather build something soul-aligned with 35 people than sell out to 350,000 for a profit.
In my holistic redesign, I keep thinking of places like Piha that are small, rugged communities, not connected to centralised infrastructure. If 35 people in a village of 1,000 changed their relationship to water, that’s enough. 3.5%. That’s how systems shift. Through trust, care, and stewardship, not domination.
In Society: Building New Worlds
The New Zealand tech industry, for all its brilliance, is a paradox; full of innovation, yet underpinned by burnout, bias, and patriarchal structures that punish sensitivity. But here’s what I’ve come to believe: we don’t need to wage war on the old world. We build a new one beside it.
If just 4,200 people in our tech sector began working from a new paradigm built on regeneration over extraction, intuition over metrics, wholeness over productivity, we could change the norm. That’s not idealism. That’s mathematics.
This is where your creative expression matters. Your rhythm, your rituals, and your side projects. Most movements begin in whispers and kitchen conversations. But if you don’t yet have a community doing this with you, let this be your space for now. Anchor here. You’re not alone.
In Self: The Inner 3.5%
What if this principle also applied to the inner world?
We all carry parts of ourselves aching to evolve. The dreams we’ve buried, beliefs that feel too big or too far away. But what if you didn’t need full confidence to start? What if you only needed 3.5% of yourself, just one tiny voice whispering “what if?”, to begin?
That part of you that still believes in softness, in magic, in your capacity. That part is sacred. Fuel it, follow it, and let it lead. Even for just five minutes a day.
Because sometimes even faith the size of a mustard seed can move a mountain.