Sustainability stories.

We announced in September 2019 that we’re very close to having complete pay equity across the organisation, meaning men and women are paid equally for doing the same job. However, because women still hold the majority of lower-paid customer service roles and are under-represented in some higher-paid areas – like IT and specialised banking roles – the pay of the median man in our company is 30.3% higher than the pay of the median woman.

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 a 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.

Paying a man and woman at the same level in the organisation equally is important. However it doesn't guarantee that both men and women have access to the same opportunities, and are represented evenly through an organisation.

We know that continuing to operate in the same way that we have will not result in changes to our gender pay gap. We need to make a significant shift in the disproportionate mix of women and men at different levels within the organisation – a legacy issue throughout our banking industry. 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 top three tiers of management who are women to 50% by 30 September 2025 (this figure is 37% as at 2019).
• Continue to detect and reduce any disparities in pay equity.
• Apply for YWCA Gender Tick accreditation and work with other organisations that hold the Gender Tick on gender pay best practice.
• Address the gender imbalance in branch and contact centre roles.
• Review all related policies and processes to ensure they support gender pay.
• Increase our paid parental leave to 100% of an employees' pay for 22 weeks (implemented 1 July, 2019).

View our full Gender Pay Analysis here.