Public Trust is committed to closing our gender pay gap

Public Trust changed our remuneration approach in 2021 to ensure we are investing in initiatives to close our gap. This includes moving to market benchmark matching for all roles at Public Trust, using data from a range of remuneration surveys that benchmark every role against similar roles in the external market. We then review the market benchmark information twice a year to ensure we are keeping pace with market movements for all our roles. 

In 2021, we also made an on-going commitment that our people’s total fixed remuneration (TFR, which includes base salary + KiwiSaver) will be above the living wage which is currently $54,080 per annum. Currently, no role in our organisation is paid below $60,000. 

We continue to actively work on implementing changes to our recruitment processes, removing bias, and ensuring women have the same opportunity to discuss remuneration as men. 

Flexible working is an important part of how we do things at Public Trust and enables our people to meet their wider commitments, including caring for whānau and contributing to their communities. Many of our people regularly work from home or another location, some work a compressed 9-day fortnight and can work offshore if personal reasons mean they need to be based outside New Zealand for a period of time. 

These robust processes, alongside our annual performance and remuneration reviews, help to ensure our people are being remunerated fairly and with consistency, irrespective of gender or ethnicity. There’s still work to be done and described below are our actions for 2024 and beyond. 

Yes. We look at senior leaders, people leaders and team members to see if there are any areas where we might need to focus further investment. 

We have good gender representation at our leadership level. This shows up with a 50:50 women vs men split at executive and senior leader level and more than twice as many women at people leader level than men. 

In the group of team members paid above $90K we have 24% more men than women. This is our biggest median pay gap at 11.6% and will be one area of future focus. 

In contrast, for team members who are paid under $90K, we have more than three times as many women as men and a median pay gap of 4.4%. 

Across our Retail competency and learning framework we have identified a smoothing out of the pay gap resulting in a reduced median pay gap of 8.1%. 

We measure both our ‘average’ and ‘median’ gender pay gap twice each year. We take these measurements at the organisation level as well as across leadership and team member groups. This helps us to identify trends, where we have pay gaps, and therefore where we need to put more focus. 

Gender pay gaps are complex and there is no overnight fix. Our pay gap is moving in the right direction but there’s still more work to be done. We now need to understand the barriers and enablers for women at Public Trust. 

We have commitments to:

• increasing transparency about our pay gap, and to addressing gender pay disparity and improving diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) at Public Trust; 

• report our 2023 gender pay gap on the Mindthegap.nz registry. As we progress with our understanding of other pay gaps, these can then be added; 

• providing an environment and support structures that eliminate inequities; 

• align with Te Kawa Mataaho | Public Service Commission guidance ; and  

• Gender at Work Community ...and we’re signed up to the ‘GenderPledge’.

From 2024 and beyond, we will deep dive into the gender pay and DEI barriers and enablers at Public Trust. We’ll have focus groups and discussions to hear from our people across many different demographics. Our work will broaden to understand pay gaps focused on ethnicity and underrepresented groups. 

The outcomes of these discussions will inform the enhancement of our policies and practices in areas such as flexibility and carers leave and inform the development of our DEI guiding principles and framework.