Equal Employment Opportunities

Table 2 below shows the overall representation of EEO groups in the Public Service and the employed labour force (where available). The Public Service continues to employ high proportions of EEO group members when compared with the employed labour force. While the representation of each of these groups in the Public Service has increased since 1998, these increases have been broadly in line with the change in their representation in the wider workforce. The proportions of Maori and Pacific peoples have levelled out over the past three years, also in line with wider labour market trends.

The relatively high proportion of women in the Public Service occurs mostly because the Public Service employs people in occupations that women tend to work in (such as social workers, case workers and clerical staff).

Maori had a high level of representation in the Public Service across all major occupation groups when compared with the labour force as a whole. The picture was more mixed for Pacific peoples, who were highly represented in the clerical, associate professional and manager groups.

Table 2:  Representation of EEO Groups 1998-2004

Robust data on people with disabilities in the Public Service are not available for 2004. In 2001, the Public Service employed a high number of people with disabilities (18.5%) compared with the labour force as a whole (14.6%), based on Statistics NZ's 2001 Disability Survey.

Table 3 below shows that the proportion of senior managers who are women has been increasing fairly steadily since the data began being collected in 1998. But the representation of the other groups shown in Table 3 has tended to fall over recent years. While 47% of new senior managers over the past year were women and 17% were Maori, these two groups also left the senior management ranks at a fairly high rate. The net effect of this for Maori was a small reduction in the proportion of senior managers who are Maori, while for women it resulted in an increase of one percentage point.

Table 3: Representation of EEO Groups in Senior Management 1998-2004