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 the communities of Aotearoa. 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 Champions for Change member organisation is 40:40:20 in senior roles [40% women, 40% men, 20% from either gender]

    • 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 

  • For ethnicity, it is important to increase our overall diversity

    • 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

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 average (mean) hourly earnings of all women and the average hourly earnings of all men within the firm. 

The ethnicity pay gaps are a measure of the percentage difference between the average hourly earnings for everyone in a specific ethnic group and the average hourly earnings of our European/Pākehā employees.

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. 

A negative pay gap means the group in question is paid more than the benchmark.

Further information on our data can be found here.

Our pay gaps

Reported at 1 July 2023

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

Our gender pay gaps

  • This is primarily a result of a gender imbalance in our most senior roles. Having more males in senior roles results in the overall higher average 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 responsibility. This profile is changing as the percentage of female partners increases and we continue to invest in leadership development.

  • From a Senior Leadership perspective (Partners, Executive Directors and Directors), we have seen an increase in female representation from 35.5% in 2020 to 42% in 2023, and will continue to focus on reducing this gender imbalance.

  • Our partner admissions for the last 12 months as of 1 July 2023 was 45% female, helping to further increase our gender representation within the partnership.

Our ethnicity pay gaps

  • Through our efforts to increase the number of people who have disclosed their ethnicity in our systems, we now have 84% of our overall population who have disclosed their ethnicity. We will continue our focus on increasing the percentage of people who disclose their ethnicity data to further help us with the accuracy of our pay gap data.

  • Māori - For our Māori colleagues, the gap has gone into the negative which means this cohort's average earnings are higher than our European/Pākehā baseline. This is indicative of a number of appointments of Māori colleagues into very senior roles over the past year.

  • Pacific Peoples - This gap has increased and reflects some attrition in the manager grade reducing representation in more senior roles. There is also a larger percentage of Pacific Peoples in lower grades compared to our European/Pākehā colleagues.

  • Asian - The gap here is driven primarily by a smaller percentage of this cohort in the most senior grades, and 64% of our Asian colleagues sit in our lower grades compared to 53% of our European/Pākehā baseline. 

  • Indian - The gap has narrowed to 6.2%. 

  • The percentage of overall populations in each group we report on are:

    • European/Pākeha = 46.8%

    • Asian = 18.5%

    • Indian = 6.7%

    • Māori = 4.5%

    • Pacific Peoples = 2.5

    • Other ethnicities = 4.9%

    • Not disclosed = 16.1%

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 will work with our People Network groups to ensure they have a say around how we might achieve this goal.

While we know we still have significant work to do, we are pleased that through our efforts to date, it  means our employee gender pay gap is lower than the national average of 8.6% (as reported by Manatū Wāhine Ministry for Women 2023).

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 PwC New Zealand. Here are some of the ways we are addressing this in our firm:

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. We have currently met that target at all levels up to senior managers. Our Director and above population has improved almost 10% since 2018, and is close to the target threshold of 40%. At Partner level, we have also increased female representation to 26% (an increase of nearly 10% since 2018). In the past year 45% of our partner admissions have been female which will help as we continue to work toward our 40:40:20 target for 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 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. We are part of Global Women’s Champions for Change, a group of 55 CEOs and Chairs who are committed to accelerating inclusive and diverse leadership in our own workplaces.

Supporting diversity in young women through our partnership with Girlboss New Zealand

Our partnership with GirlBoss New Zealand reflects our commitment to gender, and ethnic diversity as well as diverse career paths. As part of our relationship with GirlBoss we offer training and placements for young women to work with new and emerging technologies that  will set them up for their future.

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. 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. 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 and across Aotearoa. After introducing this policy in 2021, we had a 6% increase in females taking parental leave, and 62% increase in males taking parental leave from FY22 to FY23.

Celebrating the strength of our diversity

Our people networks make meaningful contributions to the culture of our organisation: Manukura Māori, Pacific Village, Shine (LGBTQIA+), Asian, Indian, Latino, Families, Elevate (Women in Leadership), Endo & Friends (Endometriosis, PCOS, Adenomyosis), 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 culture 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. More than 1,200 of our people have now completed these courses as of July 2023.

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 intently 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, 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 and more broadly in society. 

Further information on our data

  • 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. 

  • For ethnicity, we have used European/Pākehā as the baseline (not the overall average).

  • We recognise that many people identify with more than one ethnicity. For our ethnicity pay gap calculations we have included solely the primary ethnicity an individual identified. Only a small number of our people identified with more than 1 ethnic group outside of the 5 groupings we have reported on.

  • All calculations for ethnic 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.

  • We report our pay gaps as at 1 July each year.

Contact us

Erin Venter

Erin Venter

Partner, Chief People Officer, Co-leader of Diversity & Inclusion, PwC New Zealand

Tel: +64 27 592 1392

Mark Russell

Mark Russell

Chief Operating Officer, PwC New Zealand

Tel: +64 21 568 444

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