Representation

Figure 3 shows the representation of women by occupation group in the labour force and the Public Service. For most groups, the gender proportions are relatively similar. For the Personal and Protective Services Workers the difference occurs because the Public Service group is almost completely made up of prison officers (who are mostly men), while in the labour force it is mostly staff working in the retail sector (who are mostly women). Similarly, the Professionals group is mostly made up of teachers (55 percent) in the labour force, while only 2 percent of Public Service professionals are teachers.

Figure 3: Representation of Women (June 2000)

A feature of the Public Service is that for the occupation group with relatively low proportions of women⁵ (managers and science/technical) the low level of representation is not consistent across the age groups. In the younger age groups these occupations are mostly women. This suggests that the overall representation rates in these occupations may rise over time.

Figures 4 and 5 show that, for Māori, the pattern of considerably higher levels of representation in the Public Service, than in the labour force, are found within most occupation groups. The data from these graphs are also represented in Table 5.

Figure 4: Representation of Māori (June 2000)

Figure 5: Representation of Pacific peoples (June 2000)

One exception to the trend of higher Public Service representation is in the Professionals group and this is due to the contributing occupations to this group. In the labour force, most of those in the Professionals occupation group are teaching professionals, of which a relatively high proportion are Māori, but a relatively low proportion of people in other professional occupations are Māori. In the Public Service almost none of the Professionals group are teaching professionals. While the Māori representation in the Public Service is higher than the labour force figures for both the teaching professionals (16 percent in the Public Service compared with 10 percent in the labour force) and the other professionals, the high proportion of professionals who are teachers provides a boost to the labour force figures when the two groups are combined.

Table 5: Representation by Ethnicity and Occupation (June 2000)

⁵ With the exception of the Personal and Protective Services Workers (whose gender composition may be driven more heavily by the prison population than other factors) and the Trades and Production Workers where the overall numbers are too small to draw robust conclusions.