Tāmaki Makaurau, home to half of New Zealand’s digital technologies workforce, has the potential to be a creative powerhouse – but not until its diversity is represented in the sector, experts say.
Figures from Auckland Unlimited show Māori and Pasifika employees are under-represented across the digital tech industry, only accounting for 5.2% of and 6.7% of Auckland’s technology workforce.
About 11.5% of Auckland’s population identifies as Māori and 15.5% identifies as Pasifika, according to the 2018 Census.
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Meanwhile, women only account for 32% of the region’s tech workforce.
Those proportions have remained largely unchanged in the last 20 years.
Maru Nihoniho the founder and managing director of Metia Interactive, said increasing diversity in the tech workforce began at school.
One solution, she said, was for tech businesses to collaborate with schools and iwi to put together a system where children could become interested in creative technologies.
METIA INTERACTIVE/Supplied
Maru Nihoniho is founder and managing director of Metia Interactive game design and development studio, in Auckland’s GridAKL innovation campus.
“Students need to be able to see themselves in the industry,” Nihoniho said. “It’s about challenging those stereotypes and giving students the idea that they can do this too, and they absolutely can.”
She said there was growing interest in game development, especially among indigenous communities.
“When we started releasing games inspired by Māori stories, we found that our young people loved them,” she said.
“They were saying, ‘There’s a taniwha, there’s a wahine Māori character, this is so cool’. It’s exactly what I wanted to see as a young person.”
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Graeme Muller, Chief Executive of NZ Tech, says the industry wants to move towards more systemic change by creating new pathways for students.
NZTech chief executive Graeme Muller said one of the ways to increase diversity in the tech sector was to create new pathways into jobs.
“Historically the default mechanism for moving into these roles is an IT degree, and obviously that puts up barriers for quite a few people.”
He said “several” initiatives were under way, such as apprenticeships or ‘earn while you learn’ pathways, but the lack of representation was still an issue.
Muller suggested there was a link between representation and lack of interest in the sector.
“What the data tells us is demographics who are not represented in tech industries may therefore not see it as a sector to enter themselves,” he said.
Pam Ford, the director of investment and industry for Tātaki Auckland Unlimited, said upcoming events – including Tech 22 or Southtech Innov8 – in the next few weeks were aimed at “[helping] students imagine a future career in tech”.
“It is important the industry comes together to support women, Māori and Pacific people, particularly rangatahi, into home-grown career pathways, and to foster their ongoing participation in tech,” she said.
The Government recently invested another $20 million over four years towards two key initiatives in the digital technologies Industry Transformation Plan as part of Budget 2022.
