Section One: Demographics of disabled public servants

“The only area I think we are lacking is hiring people with physical disabilities. We make huge efforts to hire and develop based on a gender and racial basis but seem to almost completely ignore physically disabled people. For such a large workplace, it is very rare to see a physically disabled person.”

Gender

Two-thirds of disabled public servants were women (66.4%) and just under a third men (32.2%), which was similar to the gender distribution for the Public Service as a whole (64.3% and 35.2% respectively).[1] 1.5% of disabled public servants were of another gender or multiple genders, compared to just 0.5% of all public servants.  

Age

The disabled public servant workforce who completed Te Taunaki tended to be older than non-disabled public servants. The main differences in the distribution of disabled and non-disabled staff by age were in the 35 to 44 years (higher proportion of non-disabled) and 55 to 64 years age groups (higher proportion of disabled people). This finding is not surprising, given that ageing is a lead cause of disability. Note that the under 25 years age group also had a higher proportion of disabled public servants.

A Stats NZ report that combined 2018 data from three surveys (the New Zealand Census, Household Labour Force Survey (HLFS) and the General Social Survey (GSS)) confirmed the strong positive relationship between disability and age, with disabled people being older on average than non-disabled people. It is worth noting that disability is not static and functional limitations can change over time.

Table 1 below presents the distribution of disabled and non-disabled public servants across six age groups.

Table 1: Proportion of disabled/non-disabled public servants by age groups

Ethnicity

Table 2 below shows that more than two-thirds of disabled public servants in Te Taunaki identified as European (70.4%), slightly less than for their non-disabled colleagues (75.2%). Disabled public servants, however, were more likely to be of Māori and/or Pacific ethnicity than their non-disabled colleagues (25.9% of disabled public servants were Māori vs 16.8% of non-disabled and 13.3% of disabled public servants were of Pacific ethnicity vs 7.7% of non-disabled). Note that people could identify with as many ethnicities as were applicable so total percentages may add to more than 100%.

Table 2: Proportion of disabled/non-disabled people by ethnicity

Region

As seen in the Public Service in general, the largest proportion of disabled public servants were in Wellington (41%), followed by Auckland (16%), Canterbury (10%) and the Waikato (8%). The most obvious difference in distribution is in Wellington, where the proportion of disabled public servants is about 5% less than for non-disabled.

Table 3: Proportion of disabled/non-disabled public servants across regions

Looking within regions, those with the highest proportions of disabled workers were Northland and Southland (8.0% and 7.9% respectively), while Wellington had one of the lowest proportions at 5.0% of survey respondents.

Table 4: Proportions of disabled/non-disabled public servants within each region

[1] The gender breakdowns are based primarily on the Male/Female categories. Because the number of people who identify as Other and Multiple Genders is relatively small, it is difficult to draw firm conclusions about those groups.