Lack of diversity in applicants for senior roles One manufacturing employer attributes the lack of ethnic diversity in senior roles to a pipeline issue – that the candidates with the skill set and/or education and training required for such roles lacked diversity. This employer also believed that the lack of diversity in leadership roles within their company meant that there was also a shortage of role models, which in their view was critical to provide inspiration to gender and ethnically diverse employees to consider such roles a possibility for themselves: Those pipelines, that is coming through, if you can’t see someone that looks a little like you, you’ve got no role models there, then we need that inspiration as well. We’re certainly not different. In health, Pacific workers tend to be in frontline specialist roles (as opposed to management) and also in lower paid roles such as care). One health organisation told us: Lower-level staff are all Māori/Pacific. We only have two or three at high level. It’s really sad considering we serve a community with high Māori and Pacific numbers. Leaders need to be of the same understanding. Employers perceived Pacific workers to be concentrated among those with low levels of qualifications, which is why they understand them to be in the lower-paid work in their organisations. To break in to the higher-paid roles, a tertiary degree is often required, while Pacific workers often gain their skills and knowledge on the job. People can’t move up to management unless they get a degree. Pacific people are good with our hands. We learn by doing. System works, you need a piece of paper to tell you how to lay a pipe … How many Pacific families can afford to study and not work. Most can’t. This is not a new problem. This has been happening for decades. Only a few Pacific people do well. 001 percent of Pacific people have a path to management. A shortage of Pacific workers with specialist skill sets was often raised by employers. Particularly in health, employers reported competing for qualified Pacific staff for specialist roles. Employers noted that this put upward pressures on wages for Pacific specialist staff as individuals negotiated their salaries with the knowledge of the scarcity of their skill set. It will sound like I’m generalising, but it is coming from hands-on experience. If you’re a Pacific nurse, you can actually command a really good premium rather than the opposite and our internal salaries very much reflect that. Because we have to pay top dollar to get the culturally competent experts within those fields to be able to deliver what they do, and they’re just rare as hen’s teeth, and so it’s supply and demand and we have to pay to meet the demand. Voices of Pacific peoples 91