History of SDw
A key survey finding has shown that young diverse women need more support to grow and develop themselves into leaders.
In Auckland, Māori, Pasifika and Asian women now comprise one out of every four people, and they comprise an even larger proportion of younger women.
Superdiverse women are part of almost every family in New Zealand, given the increasing rate of ethnic intermarriage and children who identify with more than one ethnicity, according to the latest Census and Statistics New Zealand projections.
Research in the Diversity Matrix: Updating what Diversity means for Discrimination Law in the 21st Century confirms that it is typically harder for visually different women in every sphere of life, whether they are Māori women indigenous to this country or new migrants not born here.
The Human Rights Commission’s statistics over the past five years also show that discrimination complaints are increasingly based on more than one ground of discrimination – from 9.19 per cent of complaints in 2011/12 to 15.4 per cent in 2015/16. The majority of these complaints concern race and sex, followed by disability and age, sex and age (older women), and race and disability.
While some superdiverse women are already leading New Zealand at the very highest levels, they have remained chronically under-represented in the leadership of company boards, and local and central government.
