Diversity Pay Report

Our commitment

The diversity of our workforce continues to grow and by building an inclusive working environment where all our people can thrive, we can leverage their different skills, experiences and perspectives to deliver sustained outcomes for our clients. By focusing on inclusion and diversity for more than twenty years and positioning it as a matter for everyone, not just a few, we’ve made continual progress in increasing the representation of women and ethnic minorities at the most senior levels of our firm. This, in turn, is essential to closing our pay and bonus gaps which are driven by our demographics. More information on the actions we are taking to improve representation and deliver against our targets for gender, ethnicity and socio-economic background can be found in the Inclusion & Diversity section of our Annual Report 2023 and in our Diversity and Inclusion five-point action plan.

Our approach has always been based on data analysis and insights.  By using the personal data that our people voluntarily share with us in our statistical analysis and reporting, we hold ourselves accountable for improved outcomes which are essential for today and to sustain us into the future. This regular analysis allows us to pinpoint areas to take targeted action and inform our approach - to deliver equity and fairness - and then measure the rate of change. The transparency and accountability that goes alongside this work is more important to us than ever, given the level of expectation of employers and business in helping to address the inequalities that exist across the UK.

While we have more work to do, we are proud of our progress and the external recognition we received for our efforts during 2023 including: one of The Times Top 50 Employers for Gender Equality; the “Inclusive Employer” award at the British LGBT Awards and ranking fourth in the Social Mobility Employer Index. 

We first voluntarily published our gender pay gap in 2014, prior to the Gender Pay Gap Regulations being introduced in 2015. Since then we have held ourselves accountable by disclosing data points even where there is no regulatory requirement to do so.  This includes our partners in our data (currently excluded under the reporting requirements) and publishing our ethnicity pay and bonus gaps since 2018. Once again, this year we are breaking down our ethnicity pay and bonus gaps to show our Asian, Black, Chinese and Mixed Ethnicity gaps. Since 2021, we have also reported our socio-economic background (SEB) and disability pay and bonus gaps and we are into our second year of disclosing our sexual orientation pay and bonus gap having published for the first time in 2022.

Headlines for 2023

We have seen a reduction in nearly all our gender pay and bonus gaps, our socio-economic background pay and bonus gaps and in all our disability pay and bonus gaps. We are particularly pleased to see a sustained downward trend in our median pay and bonus gaps for gender, socio-economic background and disability.   

This positive trend reflects our commitment to delivering against our five-point action plan, particularly re-wiring our people processes linked to recruitment, work allocation, performance management and promotions. We know from experience that these actions serve to strengthen the diversity of our talent pipelines and indeed this year, of our internal admissions to partnership, 42% were women (40% FY22) and 19% from an ethnic minority background (14% FY22).  

However, while the high volumes of recruitment have served to boost the representation of ethnic minority talent in our business, this has primarily been at the more junior and lower paid grades.  As a consequence, we have seen an erosion of the negative ethnicity median pay gap and an increase in the median bonus gap. 

When we then look at the specific gaps by sub-ethnic groups, we can see that the significantly higher levels of representation of Asian and Chinese talent in our most junior grades are driving these changes this past year. Indeed, all of our pay gaps are driven by the under-representation of the relevant population in senior, more highly paid roles. This is why we have set targets by grade for gender, ethnic background and socio-economic background which are based on accelerating our progress over a five+ year period. Put simply, delivering our targets is essential to closing these pay gaps. 

Alongside this, we are also progressing our plans to increase the levels of disclosure in relation to disability and sexual orientation to enable us to set targets as well as conduct reliable and valid pay gap analysis because we know that small population sizes have the potential to impact our  year on year outcomes.  

It is important to note that these gaps are different from equal pay and at PwC we are committed to ensuring our people are paid equally for doing equivalent jobs across our business. We take action to address any gaps and to make sure all our policies and practices are fair.

What are we doing to close our pay gaps?

We are pleased to be making progress but we know we need to stay focused. Over the past year we have been working on this agenda more collaboratively with our staff who are helping to shape our work and contribute to our progress and this is clearly paying dividends and will continue in the future. Here you can find our five-point action plan and more information on the actions we are taking to drive transformative change across our firm to make sure all our people have a strong sense of belonging and trust in our firm.