Reporting our gender and ethnicity pay gaps

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 to delivering on our purpose of building trust in society and solving important problems. A diverse workforce strengthens our ability to understand and support the needs of our clients and the communities we serve.  

We continue to focus on increasing gender and ethnic diversity across our firm, with particular attention on representation at senior levels.

Gender diversity

For gender diversity, we maintain a clear focus on senior leadership representation.

As a Champions for Change member organisation, we remain committed to the 40:40:20 target in senior roles.

We continue to invest in the development of our emerging women leaders through our principal partnership with Global Women and their ‘Breakthrough Leaders’ and ‘Activate Leadership’ programmes.

Our Elevate Women in Leadership People Network also plays an important role in supporting wāhine across PwC, advocating on behalf of its members and raising awareness of issues impacting women in our workplace.

Across PwC New Zealand, overall female representation remains strong at 55%, reflecting continued gender diversity across our firm. We continue to see positive movement within our leadership pipeline.

Ethnic diversity

For ethnicity, our focus remains on increasing diversity across the organisation so that our workforce reflects the communities we work in and the clients we work with.

This includes:

• Recruiting diverse talent from a range of ethnic backgrounds
• Supporting development and progression once people join us
• Maintaining a particular focus on increasing Māori and Pacific representation in leadership
• Strengthening our ethnic People Networks to support belonging and visibility

We continue to see increases in employees who self-report their ethnicity (or ethnicities), which helps ensure our reporting is accurate and our actions well-informed.

We are proud of the progress made in strengthening inclusion and diversity across the firm, and we recognise that continued, long-term focus is needed. We know that many of the initiatives underway today will take time to fully show their impact, and we remain committed to this journey alongside our People Networks, our leaders, and our PwC whānau. 

Our analysis tells us that our gender and ethnicity pay gaps are primarily driven by the shape of our workforce – in particular, of our people across different levels of the firm. As our workforce profile shifts, these movements influence our overall pay gap results.

Analysis of our gender pay gaps

Our FY25 employee gender pay gap increased compared with FY24.

This result reflects the overall shape of our workforce, including how employees are distributed across role levels and the higher proportion of men in some more senior roles, which contributes to higher mean pay for men overall. 

We are encouraged by the representation of women across the firm and recognise that continued progress in senior representation remains important over time.

Our partner gender pay gap reflects a greater number of men in longer-tenured or more senior partner roles.

Analysis of our ethnicity pay gaps

Our FY25 ethnicity pay gap results were mixed compared with FY24, with some gaps widening, some narrowing, and one remaining broadly stable.

The movements in these gaps reflect the overall composition of our workforce, including a concentration of employees from some ethnic groups in more junior roles, particularly within the Asian cohort.

The narrowing of the Pacific Peoples pay gap is a positive movement, while the Indian pay gap remained broadly stable year on year.

Over time, continued focus on representation, progression and access to senior opportunities will remain important to improving balance across the firm.

Closing our pay gaps requires continued focus on growing representation at senior levels while supporting retention, development and equitable progression across all parts of the firm. We continue to work alongside our People Networks and our leaders to ensure our actions reflect the diverse needs of our people and enable long-term, sustainable change.

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:

Further information on our data

• Our pay gaps, reported at 1 July 2025, are based on the percentage difference between mean hourly earnings. 
• All male and female 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. Individuals also have the option to identify as gender diverse, and this self-disclosure enables us to understand our diversity data in more detail.
• For ethnicity, we measure the percentage difference between the mean hourly earnings of employees in a specific ethnic group and the mean hourly earnings of all other employees combined.
• We recognise that many people identify with more than one ethnicity. Our people can identify with up to three ethnicities for reporting. This is per the guidelines from Champions for Change and Stats NZ based on Level 1 reporting of ethnicities. This means the percentage representation of ethnicities equates to more than 100%, as 11% 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.