Gender and the gender pay gap
The current picture
Increasing the proportion of women in junior and mid-level ranks
In the past five years, we’ve increased the proportion of women in our junior and mid-level consulting ranks from 30 percent in 2019 to 37 percent in 2024. This progress reflects our commitment to gender diversity through targeted hiring and enhanced retention and progression opportunities. We remain focused on improving recruitment and advancing women’s career paths across all levels.
Improving representation at senior ranks
Our partner population now comprises 19 percent women, up from 10 percent in 2019, with growth at the top of mid-career ranks from 16 percent to 23 percent. Maintaining a strong pipeline of women for these roles is critical for sustaining progress in gender diversity at leadership levels.
Women in non-consulting roles
Women represent 66 percent of our non-consulting roles, slightly up from 64 percent in 2019. Senior leadership roles in these functions remain 24 percent women. We must continue to ensure that women are properly represented in our succession plans for these roles, and we maintain our commitments to supporting the growth and development of our non-consulting women at all ranks.
How we’re driving progress
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
We’ve introduced specialised training to enhance consistency and inclusivity in candidate selection and evaluations.
Mid-career pipeline assessment
We conduct twice annual thorough assessments of promotion readiness in mid-career ranks to identify necessary support and interventions for advancing women into senior roles.
Data-driven progress
We are leveraging data across the employee lifecycle to track progress on gender goals, reviewing key metrics to close gaps early. We are also piloting a new dashboard to monitor gender composition throughout the recruitment process.
Interventions that count
Our Women in Leadership programme, which provides coaching and sponsorship for women at mid-career grades, has expanded with two cohorts in 2024. 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 insight 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. This provides multiple platforms for open dialogue and feedback to PA’s leadership to voice issues and concerns, and influence 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. This includes coaching 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.
Increasing recruitment and progression in STEM/digital roles
In 2024, our Women in Tech Network relaunched free coding career development courses and expanded across the US, UK, and Ireland.
We are also piloting a skills-based assessment framework for recruitment in our Digital Stream to reduce bias, and investing 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.
Helen Mullings, our Chief People Officer, explains our 2024 gender pay gap
Looking at our pay gap for 2024, there are signs of continued progress. Both our mean and median hourly pay gaps have decreased this year, from 22.3 percent to 21.5 percent (mean) and 28.5 percent to 24.5 percent (median). Our bonus pay gaps have also reduced this year, from 53.2 percent to 48.2 percent (mean) and 38.8 percent to 29.0 percent (median). Even numbers of men and women received a bonus in 2024.
Overall pay gap between men and women
Percentage of people who receive a bonus
The reduction in our pay gap is due to a sizeable increase in the number of women progressing into our upper middle pay quartile, rising from 29 percent in 2023 to 35 percent in 2024. I’m pleased to say the positive effects on our pay gap are as a result of our increased focus on retention at mid-career levels, and the promotion of women into more senior consulting ranks supported by our talent acceleration and development programmes. The representation of women in our lower pay quartile remains near gender parity, reflective of the near gender parity of our early career consulting ranks. Meanwhile, the percentage of women in our highest pay quartile has remained static year-on-year at 20 percent.
Number of people across lower and upper pay quartiles
There are three drivers of our gender pay gap. First, underrepresentation of women in senior positions (which are also more highly paid roles) is the largest driver of our pay and bonus gaps, despite a modest pay gap in favour of women at partner level. Second, the distribution of women and men in our non-consulting corporate roles, and the overrepresentation of women in more junior corporate positions. Third, 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.
Breakdown of our mean gender pay gap by role
Moving forward, our strategy will continue to focus on accelerating the representation of women at senior levels by strengthening our internal talent pipeline – retaining and progressing more women into leadership positions. Additionally, we will intensify efforts to address gender imbalances in STEM and digital roles, 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.
What is the gender and ethnicity pay gap?
The mean gap calculation
The median 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.
The ethnicity pay gap is the measure of the difference in average pay between colleagues that have declared themselves as being from a minority ethnic background versus being majority White.
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 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.
