Reporting our gender and ethnicity pay gaps

Our commitment

At PwC New Zealand we are committed to building a talented and diverse workforce that reflects, and is inclusive of, the diverse communities of Aotearoa New Zealand. Doing this is essential if we are to deliver on our purpose of building trust in society and solving important problems.

Having a diverse workforce means we can better understand and meet the needs of our clients and the communities we serve. We have made specific commitments to increase the gender and ethnic diversity of our entire workforce. 

For gender diversity, we apply a particular focus on senior leadership representation.
  • Our commitment as a Champion for Change member organisation is 40:40:20 in senior roles (40% women, 40% men, 20% from either gender or gender diverse).
  • We are developing our senior leaders of tomorrow through our principle partnership with Global Women and their ‘Breakthrough Leaders’ and ‘Activate Leadership’ programmes.
  • Elevate Women in Leadership People Network - led by our people, for our people in PwC. It plays an important role supporting women in the workplace, by advocating on behalf of the members and building awareness of issues facing women in our work environment.
  • Evolved PwC Professional Leadership Behaviours - at all levels of our firm, these outline the required leadership behaviours - whether we lead ourselves, or others.
For ethnicity, it is important to increase our overall diversity so our organisation reflects the communities we work in, and the clients we work with.
  • Recruiting diverse talent from different ethnic backgrounds.
  • Development of individuals through career progression and promotion is important once we onboard new hires.
  • Particular focus on increasing leadership representation of Māori and Pacific peoples, while still maintaining our focus on all of our diverse people.
  • Supporting our ethnic people networks to feel a greater sense of belonging at PwC.

We are proud of our efforts to drive and progress inclusion and diversity, yet we recognise there is more still to do. We also know that it will take time to see the impact of some of the activities that we undertake today, but will be worth it.

On this page we set out the methodology for how we measure our gender and ethnicity pay gaps at PwC New Zealand, and outline the efforts we are undertaking to close our gaps.

Understanding the pay gaps

PwC New Zealand’s gender pay gap is a measure of the percentage difference between the mean hourly earnings of all women and the mean hourly earnings of all men within the firm. 

The ethnicity pay gaps are a measure of the percentage difference between the mean hourly earnings for everyone in a specific ethnic group and the mean hourly earnings of our European/Pākehā employees. For 2024, our people were able to identify with up to three ethnicities. This follows the guidelines as outlined by StatsNZ and Champions for Change reporting at Level 1 for ethnicity.

The data below has been split to show PwC New Zealand employee and PwC New Zealand partner pay gaps. Due to the nature of our partnership business model, we remunerate employees and partners differently. These pay gaps are different from equal pay, which compares the pay of people in the same or similar roles. We review individual salaries each year to ensure that we do not have any equal pay issues. 

Further information on our data can be found here

Our pay gaps

PwC New Zealand statistics on their pay gaps

Our analysis tells us that our gaps are essentially driven by our workforce profile.

 

Our gender pay gaps

  • Our gender pay gap is primarily a result of a gender imbalance in our most senior roles. Having more males in senior roles results in the overall higher mean hourly pay. 
  • Our partner gender pay gap reflects a higher number of men who have been in the partnership for longer and hold more senior roles and responsibilities. 
  • From a Senior Leadership perspective (Partners, Executive Directors and Directors), we have seen an increase in female representation from 35.5% in 2020 to 41% in 2024. We will continue to focus on managing this gender imbalance.
  • For the previous 12 months, 60% of our partner admissions were female.

 

Our ethnicity pay gaps

  • Through continued efforts, 86% of our people have disclosed their ethnicity in our people system. We continue our focus on improving this to further help us with the accuracy of our pay gap data. 
  • Māori, Pacific Peoples and Indian pay gaps - For these ethnicities the pay gaps have increased. As we have a small representation of these ethnicities in our business, attrition at senior levels has had a larger impact on the pay gap.  
  • The decrease in the Asian pay gap reflects an increase in the percentage of Asian employees across the firm from 19% to 21%.
  • The percentage of overall populations in each group we report on are:
    • European/Pākeha = 46% (July 2023 47%)
    • Asian = 21% (July 2023 19%)
    • Indian = 8% (July 2023 7%)
    • Māori = 7% (July 2023 5%)
    • Pacific Peoples = 4% (July 2023 3%)
    • Other ethnicities = 6% (July 5%)
    • Not identified = 14% (July 2023 16.%)

* For detail on how we calculate our ethnicity data click here.

Closing our pay gaps requires us to improve the gender balance and ethnic representation at more senior levels of the firm. We are undertaking a number of activities to drive this, but recognise that these initiatives will take time to have an impact. We continue to work with our People Network groups to ensure they have a say around how we might achieve this goal.

How we’re working to close the gap

We know the biggest thing we can do to close our pay gaps is to ensure we have more diverse representation across all levels of our business. Here are some of the ways we are addressing this at PwC:

Our 40:40:20 commitment

Along with the other Champions for Change member companies, we’ve signed up to a target of 40:40:20 - aiming for 40% women, 40% men, with the remaining 20% from either gender at all levels of employment.

Through targeted action female representation in Senior Leadership, including Partners, Executive Directors, and Directors, has grown from 35.5% in 2020 to 41% in 2024. In the past year, 60% of our partner admissions have been female, helping us continue to work towards our 40:40:20 target at all levels of employment.

Supporting women in leadership through our partnership with Global Women

The purpose of Global Women is to increase diversity in leadership in Aotearoa New Zealand through promoting, encouraging and facilitating the development of women. PwC is proud to be the Principal Partner of Global Women, supporting the organisation’s efforts to increase diversity at the top levels across Aotearoa New Zealand.

We are part of Global Women’s Champions for Change, a group of 60 CEOs and Chairs who are committed to accelerating inclusive and diverse leadership in our own workplaces.

 

Annual remuneration review process

As part of our process, we apply a gender lens to all promotions, salary reviews, bonus allocations and performance rating distributions. This ensures we avoid systemic bias based on gender. After each performance review cycle, we transparently share the data within the organisation to keep our employees informed about the outcomes and the steps we are taking to maintain fairness.  We also apply a gender and ethnicity lens to our pay gap reporting.

Supporting equality in parental leave

Our parental leave policy is gender neutral and inclusive for all parents, and celebrates the importance of whānau. Our recently refreshed policy includes 52 weeks extended parental leave for the primary caregiver, with 26 weeks paid. This is in addition to the New Zealand Government’s paid parental leave offering. We also acknowledge that men may take on the role as primary caregiver, and we’ve seen this increase over the last couple of years further supporting women to return to careers sooner if they choose.

Secondary carers are eligible for 8 weeks paid parental leave, and up to 44 weeks unpaid parental leave. The policy is based on the belief that each parent should have the opportunity to actively spend time bonding with their tamariki, and that by facilitating greater sharing of childcare responsibilities we can enable a more inclusive culture both here at PwC New Zealand and across Aotearoa. You can view our full policy here.

Flexible Work Arrangements

We offer flexible work options, such as remote work and flexible hours, to support work-life balance, particularly for women who may disproportionately shoulder caregiving responsibilities.

Celebrating the strength of our diversity

Our People Networks make meaningful contributions to the culture of our organisation: Manukura Māori, Pacific Village, Shine (LGBTTQIA+), Asian, Indian, Latino, Families, Elevate (Women in Leadership), Endo & Friends (Endometriosis, PCOS, Adenomyosis), Green Team, Christian and Neurodiversity networks.

They celebrate the diversity of our people, and provide our colleagues with the opportunity to come together as a community, promote diverse perspectives within the firm, raise awareness of cultural events, and advocate on important issues.

Becoming a culturally confident business

We recognise an understanding of a Māori worldview is important to our people and our communities. Through programmes such as Te Māramatanga and Te Ohonga, our Manukura Māori team supports our business to improve the cultural capability of our people, building an understanding and awareness of our nation's indigenous Māori culture and history. We understand by being culturally aware and confident as a business that we’re able to attract and retain the best Māori talent.

Manaakitanga programme

This was launched in February 2023 to help PwC achieve greater alignment to the spirit of Te Tiriti.

The name Manaakitanga embodies promoting and fostering mana-enhancing ways, by demonstrating such behaviours as aroha, kindness, care, respect and support towards one another and to others around us. It also means to show respect and care for each other’s information, journey and stories. If we are living by the principles of Manaakitanga, we uplift each other as we travel this pathway together towards incorporating kaupapa Māori approaches in the way we work. PwC New Zealand, as a private organisation, is not a Crown entity and therefore is not a party to Te Tiriti and is not obliged to uphold the principles of Te Tiriti.

However, in living our purpose at PwC New Zealand, we recognise we have a responsibility to lead and role model the way forward. This is particularly important given our role in advising Te Tiriti partners and others on Te Tiriti matters, and fostering inclusion for Māori at PwC New Zealand and more broadly in society. One of the programme’s workstreams is focussed on attracting Māori talent and providing pastoral care once they join the firm. By doing this, we ensure Māori are supported to find meaningful work that aligns with their cultural values.

Further information on our data

  • Our pay gaps, reported at 1 July 2024, are based on the percentage difference between mean hourly earnings. 
  • All employees were included in the gender pay gap data (regardless of whether they provided details on their ethnicity). 
  • We recognise and respect that gender is not binary. For this report we have calculated our gender pay gap only as the difference between those who identify as male and female. 
  • Our people system has recently been updated to enable gender diverse individuals to identify themselves. With this new function, we will continue to promote an uptake in self disclosure to understand our diversity data in more detail.
  • For ethnicity, we have used European/Pākehā as the baseline (not the overall mean).
  • We recognise that many people identify with more than one ethnicity. For this reason, we have enabled our people to identify with up to three ethnicities for reporting. This is per the guidelines from Champions for Change and StatsNZ based on Level 1 reporting of ethnicities. This means the percentage representation of ethnicities equates to more than 100%, as 6% of our people identify with more than one ethnicity.
  • All calculations for ethnicity pay gaps are based solely on the population that provided an ethnicity (self identified), not our entire employee population. Where an ethnicity was not provided, we made no assumptions and therefore they were excluded.
  • We excluded summer interns from all calculations.

Chloe Gallagher

Partner and Chief People Officer, Auckland, PwC New Zealand

+64 21 051 6699

Email

Brendan Catchpole

Chief Operating Officer, Auckland, PwC New Zealand

+64 21 389 425

Email

Follow us