The table illustrates the employment distribution of males and females across six sectors in New Zealand in 1993 and 2003.
Overall, there were significant changes in employment patterns, with a more balanced gender distribution being seen in most sectors at the end of the decade. It is apparent that a majority of females opted for the services industry, while most males were employed in the IT and farming fields.
Focusing on sectors where male employment took the lead despite some declines. Specifically, the male participation in IT outnumbered the female rate in both years, despite a decrease from 80% in 1993 to 70% in 2023, while that of females experienced an opposite trend, increasing from 20% to 30%. A similar pattern was observed in farming, where male employment decreased from 75% to 65%, and that for women rose from 25% to 35%. Although female experienced increases in these sectors, there were great disparities among employment distribution of both genders in IT and farming industries. The proportion of women in the building industry increased from 32% to 40%, whereas male representation experienced a modest fall from 68% to 60% by 2003.
Turning to categories, where there was no such different gap between two genders. In manufacturing, male workers fell slightly from 55% to 52%, while female workforces observed a modest increase from 45% to 48% after a decade. Conversely, in commerce sectors, the percentage of males in commerce saw a slight increase, from 45% to 50%, while females experienced a drop of 5% during the timeframe. It is worth mentioning that services category, where most of the laborers were females in 1993 (85%), but fell to 60% at the end of the decade, while the figure for males nearly tripled from 14% to 40% by 2003.