Addressing the gender pay gap
Our commitment to gender equality at Hays
Introduction from Matthew Dickason
At Hays, creating the best place for the best people is a key strategic priority. Central to this is our commitment to building an equitable and inclusive environment where all colleagues can thrive. Our DEI Strategy guides this work, helping us embed inclusion into every part of the colleague experience and ensuring we remain a workplace where everyone feels valued, respected and supported.
Against this backdrop, our gender pay gap reporting is an important mechanism to understand where we are making progress and where we must continue to focus. It provides transparency on our journey and helps us stay accountable to our ambition of building a truly inclusive and high performing workplace.
This year, we have maintained strong female representation in senior leadership, with women now comprising 52% of our leadership group, a reflection of our commitment to equitable pathways and diverse decision making and we continue to strengthen our remuneration governance so that our decisions are fair, transparent and consistent.
Our WE Lead (Women’s Empowerment and Leadership) Employee Resource Group invested in building capability across our workforce through initiatives such as our flagship International Women’s Day event in 2025 with a keynote by inclusion advocate Rana Hussain, and family and domestic violence training facilitated by expert organisation DV Connect. These opportunities help our leaders and teams build the confidence, awareness and inclusive behaviours that underpin a safe and connected workplace.
Our commitment extends beyond Hays. Whether through our formal partnership with Dress for Success in New Zealand or in kind support and colleague volunteering in Australia, we’re proud to contribute to gender equality and economic security for women in the communities we operate in.
While this year’s analysis shows meaningful progress in several areas, it also highlights persistent structural drivers of our gender pay gap. We remain committed to taking actions that strengthen equity, support representation at all levels, and build a culture where gender equality is embedded into our systems, leadership and everyday behaviours.
Matthew Dickason
CEO Hays APAC
Executive Sponsor of WE Lead Employee Resource Group
Gender pay gap vs equal pay: what’s the difference?
People often use the terms “gender pay gap” and “equal pay” interchangeably, however, they refer to two different concepts. The gender pay gap looks at the average earnings of women and men across the workforce. It reflects the structural and systemic factors that shape how work is valued and distributed. Equal pay, on the other hand, is about ensuring women and men are paid the same for the same, or comparable, job. Equal pay is a legal requirement; the gender pay gap is a broader indicator of inequality in the workplace.
What drives the gender pay gap?
A number of factors typically combine to create, and sustain, gender pay gaps. These include:
- Women and men working in different jobs or industries, with female dominated sectors and roles often undervalued and lower paid.
- A higher proportion of women taking on caring and domestic responsibilities.
- Limited workplace flexibility that makes it harder for employees with caring duties (often women) to take on or progress into senior leadership roles.
- More women accessing longer periods of parental leave, which can slow or interrupt career progression.
- Higher rates of women working part time.
- Discrimination and bias in hiring, promotion and pay decisions.
Types of gender pay gaps
Gender pay gaps can show up in different ways, including:
- Like for like: where women and men are paid differently for the same job.
- By level: where pay differs for women and men at the same level within an organisation.
- Organisational: the overall average pay difference between women and men across the entire organisation, regardless of role or level.
Actions toward gender equality
In 2021 we established gender targets to achieve gender balance across our senior leadership positions by 2030. We are pleased to have achieved this in 2024, and in 2025 we have maintained strong gender balance across our senior leadership positions at Hays.
Hays continues to strengthen transparency and rigour in our remuneration practices. Each year, we conduct a comprehensive gender pay gap analysis across both total remuneration and base salary, exploring any anomalies and addressing them where needed.
In FY25, we commenced the development of a global job family and job architecture framework. This work is designed to create clearer role definitions, consistent levelling across the organisation, and validated external benchmarking across comparable roles and markets. By strengthening role clarity and alignment, this framework will support fair and transparent remuneration decisions, reduce the risk of inconsistent pay outcomes, and enable more equitable career pathways across the organisation.
This work is reinforced by our continued commitment to our Senior Appointments Process, ensuring gender representation is actively considered in leadership pathways and decision-making.
Alongside structural change, we remain focused on building inclusion capability and awareness across the organisation. This is reinforced through leaders setting and progressing a dedicated Inclusion Goal as part of Hays’ leadership goal setting framework. These goals focus on building inclusive leadership capability, supporting under represented groups and creating environments where all colleagues can thrive.
Through our WE Lead ERG, we also delivered webinars on family and domestic violence, equipping leaders and colleagues with practical tools to support their teams.
Finally, we continue to build an inclusive culture by using insights from our Your Voice survey to understand engagement and inclusion outcomes for all colleagues and to guide meaningful action.
Our gender pay gap analysis
In line with our approach in the 2023–2024 reporting year, we again completed an independent review of permanent workforce remuneration for 2024–2025 to better understand the drivers of our pay gap and identify opportunities for improvement. This analysis focuses solely on our permanent workforce, which is why some results differ from those reported to WGEA. Under the WGEA framework, we are required to include both our permanent employees and our large temporary workforce, and this broader population naturally shifts the overall figures.
Our analysis included:
- Overall organisational pay gap calculations, exclusive of temporary workforce data
- Pay gap calculations of each of the WGEA manager and standardised occupational categories, exclusive of temporary workforce data
- A like-for-like pay gap analysis within our sales (specialist) business
Our analysis shows that our average (mean) total remuneration gender pay gap is 19.49%, with the median sitting at 15%.
The Average (mean) Pay Gap can be influenced by very high or very low salaries, giving a sense of overall earnings disparity. The Median Pay Gap provides a clearer picture of the typical earnings difference, as it is less affected by extreme values.
A significant contributor to this gap is the over representation of women in lower paid occupational categories, particularly clerical roles, where 96% of employees are women. And while we recognise that we’ve achieved gender balance across our senior leadership team overall, there are still more men in senior leadership roles within our sales business. These roles typically carry greater earning potential, and this imbalance contributes to the gaps we see at the upper levels. Addressing this remains a priority for us.
Hays uses structured, role dependent remuneration models to reduce the risk of unequal pay, and our like for like analysis shows strong adherence to these guidelines. Where anomalies were identified through our analysis, we examined the underlying drivers and remediated any instances of unequal pay where necessary. Most exceptions were linked to levelling within pay bands based on performance. Greater variation appears in total remuneration due to individual performance, particularly in roles where higher sales translate to higher commission outcomes.
This analysis enables us to remain accountable, uphold pay equity principles and strengthen decision making around remuneration and career pathways.
Future actions
As WGEA introduces gender equality targets for large employers, Hays will set our organisational targets as part of the upcoming 2025–2026 reporting cycle. These targets will help us remain focused on long term, sustainable progress and transparent in our commitment to workplace gender equality.
We remain dedicated to building a workplace where everyone can thrive, succeed and be fairly recognised, regardless of gender.
For more information, please contact
Bernadette Hanly
Head of Culture and Inclusion, APAC.
