Subject Matters with Professor Nareen Young

In conversation with thought leaders across the inclusion and People and Culture spaces, Subject Matters is our new interview series about the connections between sociological and feminist theories, why they matter in the context of so-called Australian workplaces, and the lived experience of what is being done well. 

First up in the series is our chat with Professor Nareen Young, the Director of the Centre for Indigenous People and Work and Associate Dean, Indigenous Engagement and Leadership at UTS Business School, and Professor, Indigenous Policy at the Jumbunna Institute.  

Nareen is one of Australia’s leading and most respected workplace diversity practitioners, thinkers and influencers. Beginning her career as a trade union official, representing women’s employment interests on the executives of the ACTU and Unions NSW, she went on to lead Diversity Council Australia as CEO and served as Director of the NSW Working Women’s Centre and Director of PwC’s Indigenous Consulting, over nearly fifteen years — work for which she was nominated for an Australian Human Rights Award and Medal. 

She is also the driving force behind Gari Yala (‘speak the truth’ in Wiradjuri), the only large-scale Australian survey of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander workplace experience that is Indigenous-led and overseen. Since the first report in 2020, Gari Yala has become, in Nareen’s words, ‘the benchmark for Indigenous inclusion research in Australia,’ with Gari Yala 2 building on those findings to track progress on the Indigenous wages gap, psychosocial harm from racism, and cultural load. 

EQI: Gari Yala 2 (Speak the Truth), found that sixty percent of Indigenous employees experience racism at work, and only forty percent describe their workplace as culturally safe. As someone who has spent decades in this field, what did it feel like to see those numbers land, and what do they tell us about the gap between anti-discrimination law and lived experience? 

NAREEN: Disappointing, obviously. The Racial Discrimination Act has been in place for fifty years, and in all of that time, the human resources and people sectors simply haven’t done their job in conveying to the workforce that it is actually unlawful to be racist at work. 

The data simply reaffirms Indigenous experiences at work — confirms what we hear in the privacy of our community anecdotally and the truth-telling our mob have been doing for a long time.  

EQI: You’ve spoken about ‘Positive Duty’ — introduced under the Sex Discrimination Act in 2022 – and the case for an equivalent duty on racism. Why do you think gender and race have been treated so differently in workplace law, and what would a positive duty on racism look like and change in practice? 

NAREEN: Practically, it’s due to the representation of gender versus race in terms of demographics. In practice, workplaces need to implement anti-racism training and racism complaints procedures — actions we know work from Gari Yala — on top of other reconciliation-based activities. 

Gari Yala 1 and 2 showed that only twenty percent of Indigenous workers reported being in an organisation that had both a racism complaint procedure and anti-discrimination training with content relevant to Indigenous peoples’ experiences of racial discrimination. Clearly organisations are not taking all reasonable steps to prevent racial discrimination or address it appropriately once it happens. 

But the introduction of the positive duty for the Sex Discrimination Act confirmed what we already knew — the implementation of the Acts in their original forms just hasn’t happened. Now, race needs to be treated equally.  

EQI: Cultural load and identity strain are central concepts in your research — the unpaid labour of educating colleagues, representing an entire people, or managing how visible one’s identity feels. How should organisations think about cultural load as a genuine occupational health and safety issue, rather than a ‘soft’ diversity concern? 

NAREEN: Firstly, workplaces should try to measure [cultural load] or understand what this looks like. Often it is compounded by racism. The amount of work generally going into unpaid workplace demands is large, and compounded by flexibility access issues, low pay, low super etc.  

We’ve reframed ‘cultural load’ as ‘unfair workplace demands’, to in part address this assumption in the employment arena that cultural load is a soft diversity concern. We need to recognise the scale of demands. In Gari Yala 2 we asked full-time respondents how many hours per week they spent on unpaid cultural work not part of their formal role. One in three (thirty-four percent) Indigenous workers worked three or more hours per week unpaid — this works out to an extra three weeks of unpaid cultural work per year. One in five (twenty-three percent) worked six or more hours per week unpaid — working out to an extra seven weeks of unpaid cultural work per year. 

Many Diversity and Inclusion and Human Resource Management leads are non-Indigenous white people who have never been on the receiving end of interpersonal and systemic racism.

EQI: Your research shows some of the most effective interventions, like formal complaints processes, are among the least used, while symbolic gestures like acknowledging days of significance are the most common. Why do you think organisations gravitate toward visibility over structural change, and what does that say about how ‘commitment’ is currently measured? 

NAREEN: Other events, like celebrating Reconciliation Week and NAIDOC Week, are easy entry points. They provide important starts to the journey, but workplaces that want to support Indigenous staff properly should look to these more effective projects.  

Organisations often don’t realise the Gari Yala findings represent their workplaces, which is why we encourage baselining through surveys and yarning circles.  

There are three types of explanations for Indigenous peoples’ exclusion from workplaces: (a) deficit narratives about Indigenous people; (b) non-Indigenous people needing to learn about Indigenous cultures (eg. acknowledging days of significance); (c) structural barriers need to be addressed.  

Many Diversity and Inclusion and Human Resource Management leads are non-Indigenous white people who have never been on the receiving end of interpersonal and systemic racism and so tend to focus on (a) and (b), when really to make meaningful in-roads we need to focus on (c) first and foremost . 

EQI: The data on Reconciliation Action Plans is striking: RAP organisations are three times more likely to have both anti-racism complaints processes and training. What is it about the RAP framework specifically that seems to shift organisational behaviour? 

NAREEN:

They shift behaviour because workplaces have to create actual roadmaps for doing work and being accountable. [RAPs] provide a structure for change that includes central external reporting — which are so crucial and recognisable, given the number of organisations that have them — which means corporates can often compare notes when being a part of the RAP Leadership Gatherings, and as part of the RAP community that provides support and roadmaps.

EQI: Psychosocial safety is increasingly framed as a workplace health obligation, not just a cultural aspiration. How do you see the connection between racism, identity strain and psychosocial harm, and should regulators be treating racism at work as a work health and safety issue? 

NAREEN: Yes — it has a drastic effect on Indigenous workplace wellbeing and willingness to participate fully in the labour market at every level. 

They are inseparable and, interestingly, the peak work health and safety bodies are starting to recognise this, guided by our research. 

EQI: Only around a third of Indigenous workers report having a functioning complaints system available to them. From your experience, what stops organisations from building genuinely trusted reporting pathways? 

NAREEN: Not wanting to know or record what is actually happening in workplaces. The data often shows up in turnover data anyway, which means it’s easier to hide and is compared to a baseline of non-Indigenous staff turnover — or gets hidden in general turnover.   

EQI: Gari Yala is described as the only Australian report of its kind: designed, told and led by First Nations people. Why did that methodological choice matter so much to you, and what does it reveal that might be missed by conventional workplace diversity surveys? 

NAREEN: [It matters] to reclaim the narrative and understand truth directly from mob.  

Indigenous-centred means we hear directly and interpret findings through an Indigenous standpoint lens. It baffles me as to how any policy or strategy is formulated unless it’s done by Indigenous people. 

EQI: If you could ask every CEO and HR leader in Australia to do just one thing differently after reading Gari Yala 2, what would it be, and why is that the lever you’d pull first? 

NAREEN: Understand and address the real root cause of Indigenous people’s exclusion from employment: interpersonal and systemic racism. 

If you’d like to learn more about Nareen’s work on Gari Yala you can head here. 

Or, to find out about how EQI can help with creating inclusive workplaces, head to our Workplace Support page.