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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 Australia and 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, since 2019. 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. Many other large New Zealand companies have also now started to make this information available.
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
This is the gap between the median pay of men and women across all roles in an organisation. The gender pay gap at Westpac NZ in 2024 is 25.8%, down from a gap of 27.8% in 2023.
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, but is slowly improving.
Our gender pay gap includes all full-time equivalent salary with any variable reward, special awards, higher duties allowance and superannuation contributions (together, ‘pay’). We think this is the fairest and most honest measure of the pay gap for our organisation.
The national gender pay gap is 8.2%, according to figures published by Statistics NZ in June 2024. This figure does not include superannuation. If we followed the Statistics NZ methodology, our gender pay gap in 2024 would be 24.5%.
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 have therefore been making changes to help bring us closer to gender parity as below:
- Publish a comprehensive annual gender pay analysis.
- Increase the proportion of our Women in Senior Leadership roles which is currently 40%. (This figure was 37% in 2019 and is slowly improving over time).
- 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 make sure they support gender pay.