Kia Ora,

I’m interested in how the University of Auckland is fulfilling its commitments to fairness, respect, wellbeing, and openness, as articulated in Taumata Teitei and the values stated in the University's equity policy. There has already been exploration of how these values are being applied via the University’s performance review system thanks to previous OIA requests. This system involves a score assigned to staff based on a manager’s perception of their performance and calibrated across the organisation. These have been very enlightening to understand how staff backgrounds correlate with performance review scores and have indicated improvements that can be made to this performance system.
However these data did not include reporting on rainbow staff. This is another area that is worth exploring especially in how it interacts with trends observed in that pay band, gender, and ethnicity data that has already been requested.

One way the university captures rainbow staff data is via the optional field: “Do you identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex or Takatāpui (LGBTQITakatāpui+)?” as part of staff profiles. As this field is optional there is likely to be some under-reporting in the data that is provided to the University as an employer.

For 2024 and all previous Tupu assessment years could you please provide the total number of each staff who received each grade in their end of year review for each possible answer (yes, no, and blank) to “Do you identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex or Takatāpui (LGBTQITakatāpui+)?”

And could you please provide this data grouped by each of: gender, ethnicity, and by professional staff pay band. These groupings should not be combined further (e.g. gender + ethnicity + performance pay grade + “Do you identify…”) to decrease the risk of identifying individuals within the dataset.

Under-reporting in rainbow staff is frequent, and privacy for people in the requested groups is important. Ensure that specific individuals cannot be identified in the data. If a cell would contain 5 or fewer individuals please use appropriate disclosure controls before sharing the data.
The preferred method would be aggregating groups where possible, for example aggregation of ethnicity data based on the groups and hierarchies used by StatsNZ: https://aria.stats.govt.nz/aria/#Classif...

Other options where aggregation is not possible or sufficient would be suppressing values that are less than 5, and indicating that these values have been suppressed with consistent notation, an example can be found in Growing Up in New Zealand’’s data output guide (page 6-7). https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/63a70...

Using these steps allows you to adhere closely with section 9(2)(a) of the OIA, and be fully transparent and consistent with the aspirations in Taumata Teitei, all while also protecting the privacy of individual people.

Please also explain any relevant caveats that should be kept in mind when analysing or interpreting this information.

Please provide this information in an accessible spreadsheet format (.csv or .xlsx).

If any part of my request is unclear or you require additional information, please don't hesitate to contact me as soon as possible.

I understand that a decision on a request for information under the OIA should be made within 20 working days of receiving that request.

Ngā mihi,
James (J) Love