police themselves or they have to assimilate into
the existing cultures or the fact that, when they
come in to my workplaces, they take off their
identity and then assume other things, I don’t see
that as a weakness. I think actually my job as a
leader is to create the conditions where they don’t
have to take off their identity at the door.
This person felt that employers did not want to
acknowledge the ethnic disparities in their workplace:
There is a team full of Māori and Pasifika workers
in this building, meaning our corporate office, and
you can tell people don’t want to say it but they’re
like, what? Where? And I just will say our cleaners
and you know there’s just like – [name], you can’t
say that! But why do we feel comfortable with not
talking about it?
Occupational segregation
For employers, pay disparities relating to
occupational segregation are considered separate to
issues of pay gaps by ethnicity for people in the same
roles. One employer in the construction industry told
us this was because the market placed different value
on different types of work:
It does come down to what is the nature of that
particular workforce, so where are Pacific people
sitting, what types of roles are they doing, because
when we’re comparing how we’re paying different
ethnicities, we want to be comparing apples with
apples as well so I don’t want to be comparing
very different types of work because actually
the reality is that the market pays different rates
for different types of roles and actually if we’re
worried about representation as opposed to the
gaps themselves then that’s a different question.
Perspectives on discrimination and raising concerns
Most of the employers we spoke to did not explicitly
speak about discrimination in the workplace.
However, when they discussed potential solutions
to the Pacific Pay Gap, some of these centred
on recognising and taking steps to eliminate
discriminatory practices, including in recruitment and
progression.
One government agency employer talked about
providing “education around bias and tools to
mitigate it” . A Pacific construction company employer
said that “teaching workers their rights would help,
clear pathways for people to contact if the rights
are breached”. Other initiatives discussed included
leadership development, graduate cohort support,
role modelling, professional development and
cultural competence training.
Several employers talked about collecting data by
ethnicity and introducing monitoring as potential
solutions. Most were not collecting ethnicity data
routinely so were unable to say where there was a
measurable gap or what might account for it. The
significance of monitoring ethnic pay gaps through
data collection and reporting was recognised by
employers as an important first step in closing ethnic
pay gaps:
You need to bring to light – so I think the data
reporting thing is actually really important because
that actually starts the conversation and you have
to have it at that really senior level to bring light to
it and to kind of really have cultural change, and
data is a helpful way to do that as well.
Some employers identified the issue raised by many
workers of the under-recognition of Pacific talent.
They noted the need for team leaders and managers
to better recognise the different expression of
leadership skills that might be expressed by
members of different ethnic groups:
Some of the attributes that are considered
typically to be those you see in people to be
promoted – so I guess it’s challenging some of the
maybe potentially not I’d say unconscious bias
but thoughts about what makes a good leader for
example.
Voices of Pacific peoples
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