PwC UK pays black people, Asians and ethnic minorities 13% less than white colleagues, admits firm

PwC said that its BAME pay gap is currently 12.8% and the BAME bonus gap is 35.4%

Fewer than one in 10 management jobs in the UK are currently held BAME employees (Reuters)

Global professional services firm PwC has revealed that it pays its black, Asian and minority-ethnic staff in the UK almost 13 per cent less than other employees in the country.

In a report on Monday, the company said that it had published the figures in an effort to “shine the spotlight on ethnicity in the workplace and encourage organisations to take action”.

“We need to start looking beyond the narrow lense of gender, otherwise true workplace diversity won’t be achieved,” said Kevin Ellis, chairman and senior partner at PwC.

From April next year, companies across the UK employing more than 250 people will have to publish their gender pay gap figures on their websites.

They must provide the mean and median gender pay gap in hourly pay as well as the mean and median bonus gap, the proportion of males and females receiving a bonus and the proportion of males and females in each pay quartile.

PwC said that it had calculated its BAME pay and bonus gaps using the same methodology as the Government requires for the gender pay gap, based on the data the firm has available from employees.

Its BAME pay gap is currently 12.8 per cent and the BAME bonus gap is 35.4 per cent. The pay gap, it said, is entirely driven by the fact that there are more non-BAME staff in senior higher-paid roles and more BAME staff in junior administrative roles. PwC said that it does pay BAME and non-BAME workers the same amount for equivalent roles.

“Our priority is to do all we can to retain our junior BAME talent and improve rates of progression to senior management levels,” Mr Ellis said.

“We’re aiming to achieve this through stronger accountability across our business to deliver our gender and ethnicity targets, monitoring our pipelines on a more regular basis and making sure that all of our people can benefit from the most stretching of client engagements,” he said.

“We are also talking to our BAME employees to understand their sense of working at PwC to see if there are any barriers we can address.”

In July, a study conducted by the Chartered Management Institute – a professional management body—in collaboration with the British Academy of Management, showed that fewer than one in 10 management jobs in the UK are currently held BAME employees.

It also showed that only 21 per cent of FTSE 100 leaders publish their current diversity levels and only 54 per cent are seen to be actively championing greater diversity in their companies.