When focussing on working households, we can see from Table 4 that there is a total of 725,313 such households in our sample; whereas after summing the different working household units by ethnicity, the total increases to 845,244 households. This indicates that just over 17 percent of working households had more than one prioritised ethnicity for adults in that unit. Here, it is useful to note that the in-work poverty rate based on working household units defined by ethnicity is 6.9 percent and thus very similar to our earlier finding based on the population sample of 725,313 working households. As shown in Figure 5, we find that Māori (8.6 percent), Pacific peoples (9.5 percent), Asian (9.4 percent), and MELAA (9.5 percent) households have an elevated in-work poverty rate compared with NZ European (5.9 percent) and Other ethnicities (5.5 percent). One of the several potential explanations for ethnic differences in in-work poverty rates could be differences in household size. 20 As shown in Table 5, New Zealand European households not only have the smallest mean number of individuals in working households relative to the other ethnicities, but this difference also becomes particularly stark for in-work poor households. For example, the average size of in-work poor households of New Zealand European ethnicity is 2.84 individuals, and this number rises to 3.54 for Asian households, 3.68 for MELAA, 3.85 for Māori and 5.14 for Pacific people’s households. These differences have important implications as the larger the household, the further the employment earnings are required to stretch to meet the needs of household members. Table 5. Mean number of individuals in working households Non-poor Poor Total 2.70 (1.31) 2.84 (1.51) 2.70 (1.33) 3.25 (1.63) 3.85 (2.02) 3.30 (1.68) 4.15 (2.08) 5.14 (2.43) 4.25 (2.14) 3.21 (1.42) 3.54 (1.60) 3.24 (1.44) 3.07 (1.39) 3.68 (1.75) 3.12 (1.44) 2.80 (1.30) 3.04 (1.54) 2.82 (1.32) NZ European Māori Pacific peoples Asian MELAA Other ethnicity Source: IDI 2019. Notes: Std dev in brackets. Working and poverty status as defined in Section 3. 20 Other potential explanations include ethnic differences in education, occupation, and discrimination in the labour market. Page 25