Our new paper “Under-represented and overlooked: Māori and Pasifika scientists in Aotearoa New Zealand’s universities and crown-research institutes” is out today https://tinyurl.com/yy22gg29  (1/13)

Ngā mihi to my fabulous co-authors @DanHikuroa, @SereanaNaepi, @Lanipai and Elizabeth Wilson. Thanks to @MBIEsci & @ChiefSciAdvisor for funding this important mahi and @punahamatatini for continuing to support me (2/13).

We collated, collected and sometimes painfully extracted data from NZ’s CRIs and unis about how many Māori/Pasifika scientists they employ. All but one CRI responded to my sometimes incessant emails (3/13).

To assess the diversity of NZ’s publicly funded scientific workforce we answered 2 questions:
(1) How many Māori & Pasifika scientists are employed at unis & CRIs?
(2) How has the % of Māori & Pasifika scientists in these institutions changed between 2008 and 2018? (4/13).

Unsurprisingly Māori and Pasifika scientists are massively underrepresented in cris and unis (5/13).

One uni even reported never having employed a Māori or Pasifika scientist in their science department for a period of 11 years (6/13).

Importantly, there were very little changes in the % of Māori and Pasifika scientists over 11 years. This shows that unis and CRIs have put in very little effort to increase the number of M & P scientists that they employ (7/13).

Many cris and a couple of unis could not supply data of sufficient quality. How can we hold these publicly-funded institutions accountable when they apparently have no interest in collecting reliable and accurate data?? (8/13).

When we say public funding it's not small amounts either. For example the Endeavour fund = $38.8 million a year, an additional $196 million for CRIs in 2020, and specific funding for advancing Mātauranga Māori research yet our paper shows a lack of M&PI scientists (9/13).

Commitments to vision Mātauranga suggest this needs to change - or we are simply continuing patterns of inequity but funding Pākehā to use Māori knowledge to advance their careers (10/13).

Without Māori and Pasifika voices our science system in NZ will NEVER reach its full potential and their continued absence is evidence of the barriers that remain in place in our research institutions (11/13).

Solutions do not simply lie in plugging more Māori and Pasifika scientists into a fundamentally broken system but require the removal of systematic barriers that prevent us from progressing (12/13).

Check out our recent research in the space on this excellent thread @SereanaNaepi (13/13). https://twitter.com/sereananaepi/status/1290372320834461696?s=21 https://twitter.com/sereananaepi/status/1290372320834461696