Study discredits Maori career stereotypes

By JULIE MIDDLETON

You know the stereotypes.

Maori work best in teams and dislike authority. Asians do what their parents tell them, graduate with commerce degrees and go for the money-making jobs.

Polynesians prefer physical work, and eat and talk a lot on the job. Pakeha kids are disrespectful stirrers.

But ground-breaking research by career counsellor Lynette Reid into what influences job decisions by Maori torpedoes a few commonly held assumptions.

It also highlights how little we, and the burgeoning army of career experts who advise us, really know about how cultural background might drive decisions.

A career counsellor for 14 years and partner in Auckland company Careerworks, Reid is among the five per cent of Maori career advisers in New Zealand, where Maori represent 14 per cent of the population. She wrote "Doing and Becoming - what personal history influences career choice for Maori" for her University of Auckland master of commerce degree.

It grew out of a desire to understand the patterns she was noticing about her clients, many of them referred through Work and Income. Maori women were often in social services, for example, and older men in manufacturing.

The question that bothered Reid was: "Why was there not a wider scope of choices?"

She had her suspicions: "Instead of looking at the influences on our choices as Maori, people were more looking at our working behaviour - for example, that we worked better in a group," she says.

"That's a long-held belief. And another is that Maori prefer physical activity.

"It's like the old adage that Maori are good at singing and sport. We were not looking one step back as to influences. We really need to be more insightful about why people are making a particular choice."

Many of the ideas underlying the advice of careers advisers stem from British and United States-developed theories of personality: certain temperaments do better in certain jobs. Others elevate socialisation, or cognitive development.

But many of those carrying the greatest clout are based on research into well-off white males living outside New Zealand, calling their applicability into question.

We do know that the factors influencing career choice are myriad and complex, among them personality, self-perception - which could include racial, cultural and sexual identity - life stages, others' expectations and experiences of prejudice among them.

But one thing is certain: only relatively recently have career counsellors and advisers become aware of how someone's cultural back-story and work decisions might intersect.

Reid's quest to define uniquely Maori career prompts involved focus on a group: the crop of Maori politicians propelled into office after the 1999 general election.

Ten of the 16 responded; 60 per cent were male, and all were in the 35-to-54 age bracket, making them an older group. (The 1996 census put the average age of Maori in New Zealand as 21 years, six months.)

As a group they were more educated than the general Maori population, and described themselves as "knowledgeable" to "very knowledgeable" in te reo (language), tikanga Maori (customs) and whakapapa (ancestry).

Despite having politics as a common bond, not all listed their career as such. The range of descriptions varied: actor, army staffer, public service, broker and manager, nursing, education administration, Maori community development, legal advocate.

Contrary to the standard ideas that the higher your family income, the more you achieve and the better your job, the sample group came largely from less-affluent backgrounds where parents' education had been limited.

Fathers' jobs ranged from waterside worker, sharemilker and Telecom linesman to barrister.

Half the group lived in extended families of at least three generations, and for most, it was expected that they involved themselves in education, sports, family, cultural and community activities.

The majority of the sample were either the oldest or the youngest in their families, both culturally significant positions in Maoridom which, says Reid, leads to very different child-rearing practices.

"The oldest has the responsibility for carrying the family mantle," explains Reid.

Eldest children are often brought up by their grandparents, as was Reid, also a first child. They get schooling in the old ways and wisdom.

Reid says: "The eldest could have resources and input placed at their disposal for education, and with that, the unspoken but well-known fact that these will, or should, eventually, benefit the entire whanau, hapu and iwi." This push to be a role model, she says, might make some seem old before their time, such is their focus on future planning. But youngest children are more likely to be encouraged to experiment and take risks.

Women were more likely to have had two working parents during their childhood and teenage years. "That fits with what we know about seeing working behaviour being modelled," says Reid.

Men, however, were more likely to have had mums who were not working during that time.

People other than parents, teachers or siblings had a significant influence on the politicians' career choices. For every single member of the group, a major influence on later career decisions was someone who acted in a mentor role during a first job.

Teachers had far less influence than might have been thought - for 80 per cent, teachers did not rate as significant influences, although women were more likely to to have received better-than-average interest from teachers in their progress.

The stronger the grasp of te reo, tikanga and whakapapa, the less likely people had been influenced by teachers. Strong cultural grounding, says Reid, was probably leading to a sense of direction and focus owing less to outside forces.

Siblings, said 60 per cent, had no influence on career decisions at all. But parental influence was strong for 70 per cent.

Friends were less influential than commonly thought. Sixty per cent reported no influence on career choice from friends, and 40 per cent said friends were actually a negative influence.

Although there is a notion that higher family income leads to increased career expectations, this group - all from less-affluent groups - buck it.

They reported that level of education of parents and caregivers, educational achievements, family income and school location and type did not hinder career choices.

While most were aware of barriers such as ethnicity and others' expectations, this wasn't seen to block progress.

Social events had no bearing on career choice for most. But to what did survey guinea pigs attribute their success?

Family support, they said.

Others talked about grooming from an early age, personal ambitions, the need for challenge, strong ideological positions, and personal motivation.

Anecdotal evidence backed by the study was that Maori tend to spend more time checking out different occupations before committing to a single path.

"People are still searching, and they're doing a lot of things," says Reid. "For some, that period ... leads to a career.

"Research might not define this as a career, but people build up a portfolio of skills.

"Other people may not see this as a step towards a career."

So what does Reid's research - which she would like to extend - mean in practice? The standard notions taught to career counsellors and advisers can't necessarily be applied to Maori.

"We run the danger of putting everyone into little boxes," she says. "Sometimes the fit isn't there."