PwC Foreword

FOREWORD

Katy Bennett, Director, Inclusion and Diversity Consulting, PwC

Jason Buwanabala, Senior Manager, Inclusion and Diversity Consulting, PwC

The uncertainty of the last few years has created a greater trust gap than ever before. However, as shown in the 2021 Edelman Trust Barometer, business is for the first time the most trusted institution in the world. This creates an opportunity and also a responsibility for organisations to address societal issues such as fairness and equality. A focus on D&I within the workplace is therefore a social and business imperative, particularly as we emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic and need to ensure business decisions are not causing unintended inequities.

To truly create change you need data to identify where interventions are needed and hold leaders to account, just as you would for any business priority. Often a lack of robust data and measurement has been behind the lack of progress within businesses and at a societal level.

Diversity data can offer a window into your organisation's make-up, showing you how things are changing, where to focus your efforts and how you compare against the available talent pool.

Yet despite this, the majority of businesses still do not have or report diversity data beyond gender. Recent PwC research found that in the UK the number of companies who have voluntarily disclosed their ethnicity pay gap is around 10%, down to only 4% when looking at Financial Services (FS) respondents. But things are changing, around half of FS respondents are planning to disclose within the next 3 years.

Beyond this research we have seen an increasing desire from organisations we work with to collect and analyse data on the diversity of the workforce, globally and across many dimensions of diversity.

The journey of diversity data collection can be complex but in this report we aim to provide you with guidance to support you on the way, helping you answer questions you may have such as:

How can I build the case for gathering diversity data?
What data should I be collecting?
Who should I involve in the process?
What are common pitfalls along the way?
How can I use the data I gather to gain insights from it?

The focus of this report is collecting diversity data on an attributable basis, allowing you to link the data to existing data on your employees such that you can apply a diversity lens on your workforce and calculate metrics such as pay gaps and break down representation by location, departments and grades.

To bring to life some of the content in this guide you will find throughout: case studies from organisations in the industry, videos from our subject matter experts and polling questions to see how you compare against other readers.

We would like to thank the IA for masterminding the creation of this report and all of the members of the IA’s DDWG who have contributed their ideas and experiences. We hope this guide is a useful tool for organisations wishing to collect and analyse diversity data in order to proactively improve fairness and equality in the workplace and beyond.