Cost, sexism and racism are barriers to ethnic women entering Aotearoa New Zealand politics, a University of Auckland researcher says

A University of Auckland researcher shedding light on the unseen and unheard stories of ethnic women in New Zealand politics has won a prestigious Fulbright New Zealand Award for 2022.

Associate Professor Rachel Simon-Kumar of the School of Population Health received the award at a formal ceremony in Wellington this week.

The Fulbright Scholarship will allow Simon-Kumar to travel to the United States to work with US academics and present her work to scholarly audiences.

“Ethnic women have shaped New Zealand’s political landscape since the days of Kate Sheppard, but they have been largely forgotten in history,” Simon-Kumar says.

The Ethnic Women in Politics (EWP) project led by Simon-Kumar and funded by a Marsden grant of the Royal Society of New Zealand, aims to highlight ethnic women’s unique contributions to political leadership.

The Women in Politics (EWP) research project is ‘about and by’ ethnic women. Their research aims to examine lived realities of women in New Zealand politics, specifically focusing on those who are non-Pākehā, non-Māori and non-Pasifika, addressing the complex intersections between gender, ethnicity, culture and politics in Aotearoa’s bicultural and multi-ethnic democracy.

There are currently eight ethnic women from diverse migrant and refugee backgrounds in Parliament representing major and minor parties.

Simon-Kumar’s research, co-conducted with Professor Priya Kurian of the University of Waikato, has so far found that nearly 200 women have stood for local and parliamentary elections over time.

“Given the many barriers to participating in elections, this is an outstanding number,” says Professor Kurian.

“Our early results show that money, racism and sexism are the reasons for ethnic women’s reluctance to enter politics.”

The Fulbright Award, one of the largest scholar exchange programmes in the world, will help Simon-Kumar to continue working on the research project at Georgetown University in Washington DC.
 

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