'Cut the brown box-ticking out': Why so few Māori and Pasifika are at the board table

Friday, 19 June 2020

Mavis Mullins has been on boards in New Zealand, big and small, for the last 20 years, and she knew when she was the token Māori.

But she wasn't embarrassed about it – that was when it was even more important to make her voice heard.

“It can be daunting, I remember it used to be very daunting and you’re often underestimated, you’re not really valued like some of your colleagues.”

It meant she became more purposeful and took time to get the lie of the land.

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**

“When you get into these governance roles it’s OK to have a voice and to bring your voice to the table, but it’s just as important to know what are the rules around this game – they’re very rarely explicit.”

She has been on the boards of state-owned enterprises like Landcorp, of Massey University, 2degrees, Unicef, and the Rangitane iwi trust in Dannevirke.

Progress has been slow.

“I’m on the board of the Hawke’s Bay Rugby Union, I’m the first woman and I’m going, oh my God, I’m still leading that,” she said.

Despite Māori and Pasifika being at the wrong end of many statistics, often they weren't at the decision-making table where they could raise issues, ask questions, and help find the best solutions, she said.

“We’re fooling ourselves if we think that people with great intentions can actually see through lenses of which they have no experience, or really no understanding,” she said.

Strong leadership was key – the chair needed to ensure all voices were heard, not just the loud ones, Mullins said.

“Otherwise then you truly are the token because it’s difficult for a small voice to be heard where there’s big voices all around.'

Now may be a pivotal moment to increase that diversity.

“Black Lives Matter, #Metoo, all of those are just giving the air that things are not right how they’ve been,' she said.

“I think the time is absolutely right - the time has been right for a long time, but it’s having all the ducks in line so that it’s almost like the perfect reason why.'

DIVERSITY ISSUE BUBBLING UP

According to the Ministry of Women's Affairs 2019 stocktake on gender, Māori and ethnic diversity on the Government's 430 state sector boards and committees, 21.1 per cent of board members were Māori, 4.6 per cent were Pasifika, and 3.6 per cent described themselves as Asian. Just over 71 per cent of appointees were European.

That compares with 70 per cent of New Zealanders who identified as European in the 2018 Census, 16.5 per cent who identified as Māori, 8.1 per cent who identified as Pacific peoples, and 15 per cent who identified as Asian.

Air New Zealand chair Dame Therese Walsh said the whole issue of diversity on boards had only bubbled to the surface in the last five to seven years. Before that, directors came largely from an existing pool of directors or chief executive roles.

“So I think the problem for all these groups of people, whether it’s me as a woman, or Māori, Pasifika, the pipeline hasn’t been as strong because we’ve only been looking at getting directors from only a couple of different options in terms of their background, and now we’re looking at it in a much more open way and looking at people from very different backgrounds.'

Air New Zealand had a 50 per cent split in terms of gender on its board, and had identified ethnic diversity as important.

The first appointment Walsh made after she became chair last September was Laurissa Cooney, who is Māori and has held senior roles with Deloitte in New Zealand and Deloitte Touche in London.

'Since then we’ve made another appointment of a director who has iwi affiliations and is of Maori descent [Dean Bracewell], so we’ve really come a long way in that regard.'

Also important was geographical diversity, having directors from throughout New Zealand and even overseas, along with a diversity of age and experience.

“People look at me and they say well I’m a woman so I tick that gender box, but actually one of the reasons I offer a lot of diversity is because my background is in Wellington, I’ve had a lot to do with the government sector, not everyone in Auckland has,' Walsh said.

With only seven or eight seats, each board member had to tick multiple boxes. Cooney was a younger Māori woman from the regions, with insight into customers outside the main centres, and with a strong financial background.

The board had changed its approach, leading to some of its most recent appointments.

“Boards, typically how they pick directors is they do a skills matrix, so they say we need an accountant or a lawyer or somebody that knows about airplanes. What we’ve been doing is overlaying a diversity matrix over the skills matrix so it’s looking at it from different perspectives, not just skills but also diversity of view and experience.”

Appointing directors from different backgrounds meant other people saw it and realised it could work.

“Are we the most diverse board that we could possibly be? Probably not, but are we quite diverse? Yes, and is that quite a good outcome for today? Yes it is,” she said.

“I think we are as diverse a board that I’ve seen and been part of, but there’s always room for improvement and there will be until we get that pipeline really working.”

Diversity was something you could feel, said Walsh.

“You can feel when a board has a good discussion with different perspectives, a really good debate around the pros, the cons, the rights, the wrongs of something and actually come to a good conclusion, and you feel like it’s been canvassed properly and different perspectives have been listened to, and that to me is diversity in action.'

'BROWN BOX-TICKING'

Head of the New Zealand Māori Council Matthew Tukaki said New Zealand was a “brown box-ticking sort of community' when it came to board roles.

'So they look at a board directorship, the question of Māori comes up - that’s OK, we’ll get a kaumatua and we’ll show our cultural practice that way.

'Well, the kaumatua will turn up to a board meeting, not participate because that’s not their role, they’ll do a karakia, stay for a cup of tea, everybody feels good about it, the kaumatua will go.'

Tukaki said he was greatly troubled by the level of representation at SOEs.

'When you’re dealing in large infrastructure SOEs like KiwiRail, which travels across a large chunk of Maori-owned land, you would have thought, given the complexity of how that works, they’d have a member of the board for that specific information, knowledge and experience.'

Talented Māori and Pasifika candidates were out there in bulk, he said, but the appointment process was often done by the same old recruitment companies with the same old databases.

'People pay all this money to go to the Institute of Directors and do a programme, they do a lot of work and try to boost their LinkedIn profiles to be noticed, they try hard but they never get above the recruitment processes. As a result we miss the opportunity to be better organisations.'

A diversity of views helped shape better decision-making and the ability to respond to different things going on in the community, he said.

'If you just continue the whole proposition of getting a view from a board that’s full of middle aged, older males, you’ll always get the same response.'

Institute of Directors (IOD) chief executive Kirsten Patterson said the greater the diversity on boards, the greater the decision-making.

'So we want to bring as many skills and experiences and thoughts to the board, particularly around areas of risk and opportunity, and having Māori and Pasifika directors really helps bring value to that because of the different world view they bring.'

About two-thirds of IOD members shared their ethnicity, of whom only 7.6 per cent identified as Māori and 1.6 per cent as Pasifika members.

There were a number of reasons for the lack of diversity on boards, including an environment where different candidates were not welcomed.

'There’s no good going out and trying to find diverse candidates and then actually closing down their voices and not having an environment where people can be heard and respected,' Patterson said.

The problem was not a lack of suitable candidates for board roles, she said.

'We’ve been saying for many years that in the law profession or the accounting profession we’d have more female partners when we had more female graduates. But we’ve had parity on that for some 20-odd years now and still don’t have those numbers coming through.'

Corporate culture in general had to become more reflective of New Zealand's population.

There had been some progress, but it had to speed up. Recruitment processes had to be more transparent and go wider, and chairpeople had a key role in demanding that.

'I think that’s been a real shift in recent times, that it’s not just a case of self-selected people being invited to apply for boards,' Patterson said.

'And that role-modelling of other great Māori and Pasifika directors that people will look up to and say, well actually there is a place for me as well.'

There was a lot of great governance happening in kohanga reos, kindergartens, Plunkets, churches, community groups, but it was not often considered governance because it was in the community sector.

The institute was supportive of a target for diversity, and had been recommending that to its members for about five years.

'I’m not supportive of quotas, the reason being that I would like to see the system changed to the extent that we have inclusive boards and inclusive workplaces where the quota’s not required.'