KPMG releases partner pay gap data
The firm reported a 42% mean pay gap between all male and female employees, including partners
KPMG has become the latest firm to publish updated gender pay gap data incorporating partners, following suit from EY and Deloitte.
Overall, the firm reports a 27% median and 42% mean pay gap between all male and female employees, including partners, and a 11% median and 12% mean pay gap at partner level.
KPMG reported a 22.1% median gap and a mean 22.3% gap in December 2017, excluding partners from the calculation.
Bill Michael, chairman of KPMG in the UK, said: “Like many businesses our gender pay gap is driven by having fewer women in senior roles and it will persist until we reach gender parity across all levels of our firm.”
Michael said that improving diversity is a “critical issue” for the firm. He added: “Having a diverse mix of talented people to advise our clients is fundamental to our commercial success and we’re looking at every stage of our recruitment and talent management process to help us do that.”
The chairman acknowledged the prevailing issue of women struggling to travel up the corporate pipeline.
He said KPMG was “the first of the Big 4 to achieve gender parity in our graduate hires” and at senior level 29% people promoted to the partnership in 2017 were women and 40% of board members are female.
Despite this, Michael conceded: “We still do not have enough women in middle and senior management roles and our statistics bear this out.”
“To tackle this our leadership has committed substantial resources to better understand the diversity of our business and identify the barriers preventing talented people joining and progressing through our firm.”
