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Gender equality.
What we’re doing to foster a working environment that is inclusive for everybody.
Our focus on gender equality.
We have a strong focus on gender equality and have put substantial effort into championing the achievements of inspiring and influential women.
In 2019 we decided to build on the work we'd already done in the area of gender pay and investigate further. In some countries, like the United Kingdom, large businesses are required to publicly report on their gender pay gap every year. This is not the case in New Zealand.
However, we think there needs to be more discussion about gender pay. That's why we decided to voluntarily make our numbers public. We wanted to spark a conversation about the kind of jobs women and men do and the way they are paid, and what needs to be done to make things more equal.
Our findings.
Gender pay equity
This means paying men and women equal money for doing equal work. We’ve more or less achieved this, with exceptions in a small number of areas.
Gender pay gap
The gap between the median pay of men and women across all roles in an organisation. The gender pay gap at Westpac NZ in 2023 is 27.8%, marginally up from a gap of 27.4% in 2022 and down from a gap of 28.5% in 2021.
Why is our gender pay gap so large?
We believe our gender pay gap largely reflects historical characteristics which are common to our industry. Traditionally, in banking, management roles were predominantly filled by men, and front line service roles by women. Despite our efforts to promote balance in recent years, including growing more leaders to be women, a disparity remains.
Our gender pay gap includes all pay for all employees, including base pay, bonuses, and superannuation. We think this is the fairest and most honest measure of the pay gap for our organisation.
The national gender pay gap is 8.6%, according to figures published by Statistics NZ in June 2023. This figure does not include superannuation. If we followed the Statistics NZ methodology, our gender pay gap in 2023 would be 26.7%.
What are we doing?
We know that continuing to operate in the same way that we have will not result in changes to our gender pay gap. We are therefore making the following changes to help bring us closer to gender parity. We will:
- Publish a comprehensive annual gender pay analysis.
- Increase the proportion of our Women in Senior Leadership roles to 50% by 30 September 2025. (This figure was 37% in 2019, rose to 47% in 2021 and is now at 43.8%).
- Continue to detect and reduce any disparities in pay equity.
- Address the gender imbalance in branch and contact centre roles.
- Review all related policies and processes to ensure they support gender pay.