Gender and the gender pay gap

Gender representation in non-consulting roles

In 2020, 17.9 percent of our workforce were in non-consulting roles, with 64.6 percent of these roles held by women. This has risen to 66.4 percent of roles being held by women in 2025, with non-consulting roles now accounting for 16.6 percent of our workforce. This is against a backdrop of our overall headcount increasing by 18.8 percent.

Women’s representation in senior leadership roles in these functions is now at 33.3 percent in 2025, up from 25.0 percent in 2020. It remains essential that women are adequately included in our succession planning for these positions, and we are dedicated to fostering the growth and advancement of our non-consulting female women at every level.

Increasing women in leadership roles

Over the last few years, we’ve implemented several initiatives to foster gender equity in leadership:

Training for hiring teams

WWe require those involved in recruitment to complete specialised training to enhance consistency, remove bias, and promote inclusion in candidate selection and evaluations.

Mid-career pipeline assessment

We conduct twice annual thorough assessments of promotion readiness in mid-career and senior ranks to identify necessary support and interventions for advancing women into our most senior roles.

Data-driven action plans

We are leveraging data across the employee lifecycle to track progress on gender goals, reviewing key metrics to close gaps early. We are also using a new dashboard to monitor gender composition throughout the recruitment process. This data feeds into localised strategies across each area of our business, enabling us to take swift and incisive actions to drive progress.

Interventions that count

Our highly effective Women in Leadership programme, which provides coaching and sponsorship for women at mid-career grades, delivered two cohorts in 2025. To date, the programme has seen 166 participants, with 57 women achieving at least one promotion, three achieving two promotions and nine participants having been promoted to partner. We also empower senior leaders to sponsor next-generation female talent through initiatives like 360 Voice Circles, a programme of peer mentoring and Shadow a Leader, which offers women real-world exposure into the day-to-day of senior leaders.

Open conversations

We continue to engage with our Women’s Network and analyse engagement survey data through a gender lens. We follow this up with localised listening sessions, aimed at understanding the most pressing workplace issues and concerns facing our women. This provides multiple platforms for open dialogue and feedback to PA’s leadership and influence on firmwide direction on topics of gender parity.

Driving positive outcomes through transparency in performance and promotion

We’ve enhanced fairness and equality in performance and promotion processes, resulting in improved outcomes for women in both junior and mid-career ranks. Comprehensive guidance and training reduces the impact of bias throughout the process and real-time scrutiny of results allows for interventions when a need arises.

Supporting our working families

We’ve redesigned our parental support policies to minimise the impact of maternity breaks on career momentum. In 2025, a review of our interventions resulted in an improved coaching programme for all parents upon returning from leave, with tailored one-on-one coaching for senior-level employees to ensure a smooth transition back into the workplace.

We were also named as one of the UK’s Top 30 Employers for Working Families by Working Families, the national charity for working parents and carers. This recognition celebrates organisations that lead the way in supporting parents and carers through flexible and family-friendly policies.

Increasing recruitment and progression in STEM/digital roles

In 2025, our Women in Tech Network expanded access to their industry leading free coding career development courses which are now available across the US, UK, and Ireland. We have rolled out a tailored skills-based assessment framework for recruitment in our Digital Stream to reduce bias and invested in upcoming female digital talent through a digital apprenticeship programme launched in 2022, which we are now scaling.

Through these efforts, we are driving lasting change, ensuring women have the resources and support to succeed at every stage of their careers.

Overall bonus pay gap between men and women

Percentage of people who receive a bonus

Looking at our 2025 pay gap suggests our progress in the last year has been limited, but within the data there is lots to be positive about. Following a large increase of women progressing into our upper middle pay quartile in 2024, we have seen a similarly large increase in women progressing into our lower middle pay quartile in 2025, from 38 percent in 2024 to 41 percent in 2025.

Our continued talent acceleration and development programmes, and a focus on retention, are contributing to a steady increase in the representation of women in our mid-level consulting and senior consulting ranks, both of which have increased year-on-year.

This is supported by the flow-through of talent from our early career consulting programmes, which have been at near gender parity now for a number of years. The impact of these positive results can be seen both in the changes in the composition of our pay quartiles and when looking at a more detailed picture of our pay gap.

Looking only at our consulting workforce, which accounts for around 80 percent of our people, our overall consulting pay gap has decreased from 15.8 percent (mean) in 2024, to 14.7 percent (mean) in 2025, with decreases at every seniority group.

Meanwhile, the percentage of women in our highest pay quartile remains static at 20 percent, highlighting slower progress in increasing the representation of women in our partner ranks, which we need to continue to address.

2025 gender representation in our pay quartiles

Mean pay gap in our consulting roles 2024-2025

The most significant structural driver of our gender pay and bonus gaps remains https://www.paconsulting.com/admin/content/entries/pages/229107-gender-and-the-gender-pay-gap?draftId=42943#the distribution of women across our consulting ranks and the underrepresentation of women in senior positions which are also more highly paid roles. This is despite a negative pay gap in favour of women at partner level.

The representation of women in highly technical STEM and digital consulting roles, which carry a salary premium and where the gender imbalance in the talent pool remains a barrier, continues to contribute to a small part of our pay gap.

In understanding why our pay gap has remained flat in 2025, we must look at our non-consulting corporate roles. Here the pay gap has increased from 20.9 percent (mean) in 2024 to 26.4 percent (mean) in 2025.

Mean pay gap in our non-consulting roles 2024-2025

As in previous years the distribution of women and men in our non-consulting corporate roles, and the overrepresentation of women in more junior non-consulting positions contributes to a pay gap in these roles. This feeds into our overall gender pay gap. Our 2025 increase can be attributed to changes to pay and bonus practices for on-call or out-of-hours working in core support roles which are disproportionately occupied by men, including IT, risk, and compliance. 

This is supplemented by the year-on-year impact of hiring, turnover, and role changes in our wider non-consulting population. A number of junior non-consulting roles were also regraded in 2024, which will open up more career progression and earnings potential opportunities in the longer term, however this has not yet impacted our non-consulting pay gap. Moving forward into 2026 and beyond, our strategy for closing our gender pay gap remains focused on accelerating the representation of women to senior levels across both consulting and non-consulting roles.

As outlined, we are committed to growing our internal talent pipeline, particularly for our most senior partner roles. We are focussed on providing talent interventions that make a difference, providing the right support at the right time, and leveraging data to hold ourselves to account. Our belief is that with these actions, we can deliver on our goal of recruiting, retaining, and progressing more women into leadership positions.

Additionally, we will intensify efforts to address gender imbalances in STEM and digital roles in both our consulting and non-consulting workforce, ensuring that progress is made across all levels of our business.

While we are encouraged by the steps we’ve taken, we are committed to continued transparency and sustained action as we work towards long-term, meaningful change.

The median pay gap calculation

The gender pay gap shows the difference in the average hourly pay between all men and women in the organisation, expressed relative to male earnings. The gender pay gap is different from equal pay, which deals with pay differences between men and women who do the same jobs, or work of equal value.

We already have equal pay across PA. We conduct equal pay audits annually, benchmarking the salaries of those who do the same jobs or work of equal value, and analysing results for bias before correcting any inconsistencies.

We use similar calculation methods to calculate our mean and median gender and ethnicity pay gaps.

We confirm we calculated our gender pay gap in accordance with The Equality Act 2010 (Gender Pay Gap Information) Regulations 2017.

The Office for Equality and Opportunity (OEO) advises organisations to report on pay gap data using information employees have provided for payroll purposes. This is a binary field (male or female). We are committed to respecting how an employee identifies in terms of their gender. We follow current OEO guidance on pay gap reporting in cases where an individual identifies as non-binary (not identifying as either male or female). This allows for employers to omit non-binary individuals from gender pay gap calculations.