Ethnic (pay) disparities in public sector leadership in Aotearoa New Zealand

New Zealand Governments have longstanding policy commitments to equal employment practices. Little attention has been paid to ethnic pay disparities in recent years. Informed by a series of official information act requests, we were interested to find out what extent, ethnic pay disparities existed within the core public sector and district health boards (DHBs). We examined the population proportions of Māori, Pasifika and Other ethnicities earning over $NZ100,000 over five year intervals between 2001 to 2016, using linear regression analysis. The analyses showed a statistically significant pattern of ethnic pay disparities across the public sector. There were fewer Māori and Pasifika staff employed in DHBs than their population proportion. The failure to promote Māori and Pasifika to the upper tiers of public sector is consistent with definitions of institutional racism. The authors call for more research to understand the dynamics of ethnic pay disparity and the drivers of this disparity.

You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby, but You Still Have a Long Way to Go: Gender-Based Pay Inequality in U.S. State Bureaucracies, 1995-2015

Previous research on gender-based inequality in public-sector state-level bureaucracies finds evidence of glass ceilings and glass walls; however, previous research does not evaluate these factors together, nor does this research extend beyond the late 1990s. This study uses newly available data from the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC)—data spanning from 1995 to 2015 that include the entire universe of female and male administrators—to evaluate this research question: Are gender-based pay disparities and glass walls among administrators in state-level bureaucracies related to the policy/program missions of state agencies? This study observes administrative-level gender-based pay disparities in all state agency types. Furthermore, this study finds evidence of occupational segregation or glass walls in distributive and regulatory agencies, but not in redistributive agencies. The findings indicate some progress for women; however, as recently as 2015, U.S. state bureaucracies, on average, did not achieve gender equity among their administrative ranks.