Professional services organisation PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC) has reported a 12.8% mean ethnicity pay gap for its black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) UK staff as at July 2017, according to its 2017 annual report.
The organisation, which has published its ethnicity pay gap data for the first time, also recorded a BAME bonus gap of 35.4% for 2017.
The calculations were based on the same methodology used to fulfil the government’s gender pay gap reporting requirements.
Analysis by PWC attributes the BAME pay gap to the fact that there are more non-BAME staff in senior, higher-paid roles, with the majority of BAME employees working in junior and administrative roles.
As at July 2017, 7% of the organisation’s partners are from a BAME background, although PWC aims to have 10% of its partners as BAME employees by July 2020. Just under a quarter (23%) of managers are BAME employees, compared to a 26% 2020 target; 14% of senior managers are BAME individuals, compared to a 20% target for July 2020; and 9% of directors are BAME employees, compared to a 14% target for July 2020.
To help improve diversity across the organisation, PWC has committed to three key areas to deliver on by 2020. These include managing the talent pipeline to ensure female and BAME candidates have the necessary sponsorship, coaching and development support to excel within the organisation, work allocation measures in order to ensure female and BAME staff are able to gain relevant business experience to help them gain promotions without being subjected to unconscious bias, and making more staff accountable for delivering diversity targets, for example, holding service and business unit partners accountable alongside the executive board.
PWC has voluntarily published its gender pay gap data since 2014. Its mean gender pay gap currently sits at 13.7%, compared to 15.2% in 2016, and its mean gender bonus gap was recorded as 37.5% for 2017.
Kevin Ellis, chairman and senior partner at PWC, said: “We’re hoping that by reporting our BAME pay and bonus gaps we can shine the spotlight on ethnicity in the workplace and encourage organisations to take action, just as gender pay gap reporting has done for highlighting the gender imbalance we have at the top levels of organisations. We need to start looking beyond the narrow lens of gender, otherwise true workplace diversity won’t be achieved.
“While progress has been made, many barriers still exist in today’s businesses which means people aren’t able to reach their full potential. The more we understand what these barriers are and why they exist, the quicker we’ll be able to work towards creating truly inclusive organisations.
“The progress made on gender shows the importance of organisations openly discussing the barriers and challenges, and learning from each other on how we can all create truly inclusive organisations. While our analysis shows that we pay our BAME and non-BAME employees equally for doing equivalent jobs, it does reveal that we have an imbalance at the senior levels of our business.
“Our priority is to do all we can to retain our junior BAME talent and improve rates of progression to senior management levels. We’re aiming to achieve this through stronger accountability across our business to deliver our gender and ethnicity targets, monitoring our pipelines on a more regular basis and making sure that all of our people can benefit from the most stretching of client engagements. We are also talking to our BAME employees to understand their sense of working at PWC to see if there are any barriers we can address.”