Tower champions gender diversity and inclusion

This week marks International Women’s Day (IWD) on 8^th March – a global day celebrating the social, economic, cultural, and political achievements of women.

At Tower, we understand people are the ultimate drivers of our success and we pride ourselves on putting our people first. We believe in investing in a diverse, inclusive culture where everyone can contribute and feel valued.

By creating a culture where everyone can feel comfortable to bring their whole selves to work, we can empower our people.

This is at the very core of our corporate values and is reflected in the day-to-day operations at Tower.

2022 is also a special year that marks the 50^th anniversary of the Equal Pay Act. To help advance this cause for Aotearoa, Tower is taking part in a voluntary initiative led by Mind The Gap to sign on with full public disclosures about gender and ethnic pay gaps.

New Zealand’s gender pay gap has remained at 9% range for the past few years, according to Stats NZ. In reality, however, the gap is closer to 33% when benefits, cars, insurance, superannuation, and bonuses are included.

In 2021, our gender pay equity was -1.4%, which shows that women are paid 1.4% more than men for the same role. That means that across the vast majority of roles at Tower, we are paying men and women close to an equal wage for doing equal work.

Looking more closely at how our senior leaders are paid, men are paid 1.8% more than women. This also shows that we’ve achieved near-equality in how women and men are paid for doing the same work.

We achieved this by reducing the pay bands from 15 down to just nine, with plans to further reduce the number in future. We’ve been working hard to flatten our structures, so we can become more agile, nimble, adaptive, transparent and fair – the way an insurer should be in 2022.

We are only at the start of this journey to normalise gender diversity and inclusion at Tower and there is still work to be done to support women to progress in their careers.

At present we have more men in senior roles, and a large proportion of women in some of our junior roles. This tilts our gender pay gap to 21.3% when we compare how much all our men are paid with how much all our women are paid.

This situation isn’t unique to Tower. However, we are committed to doing everything we can to close this gap by examining what’s causing it and creating an action plan on how to address it.

We are confident that we’re on the right track, because having the data is the first step to making positive changes across our business where needed, including promoting more women into leadership roles and advancing their careers paths.

At Tower we value transparency and strongly believe in sharing our data - giving people the information they need to make good decisions, whether that’s customers or our people.

Over the coming months we will be working to further strengthen our gender pay gap transparency  and actions by incorporating data from our teams in the Pacific. Another important focus will be to understand our pay equity position for our Māori and Pasifika team members. We are proud to be a diverse business and are committed to doing more to support transparency, fairness and equity for all our people.

Ngā mihi,

Tower CEO Blair Turnbull