Gender diversity
As a member of Global Women: Champions for Change, Meridian has set – and achieved – a target for overall gender balance of 40% women, 40% men and 20% any gender across the organisation. We also have ongoing commitments to achieve gender balance across leadership and senior roles.
At present, almost half (~48%) of employees across the Meridian Group are women, as are 40% of our people leaders. Females also comprise 57% of our Board and 36.4% of our Executive Leadership Team (40% if you exclude our CEO). But, like many organisations, women are still under-represented at senior management levels below this, so we have set a target to increase female representation in senior leadership roles to 30% by 2026.
To further improve gender balance at all levels, each year we aim for 40% of our new hires being men, 40% women and the remaining 20% being of any gender. We’re also closely monitoring the retention of women who are already in our leadership roles and will respond with appropriate initiatives if an adverse trend arises.
Diversity by gender by career level FY24
| |
Female |
Male |
| Executive |
36.4% |
63.6% |
| Senior manager |
28.8% |
71.3% |
| Mid manager |
50.6% |
49.4% |
| Mid non-manager |
30.0% |
70.0% |
| Junior manager |
67.9% |
32.1% |
| Non-managers |
60.7% |
39.3% |
| Total |
48.1% |
51.9% |
We continue to develop programmes to improve our gender balance. We believe that increasing gender diversity will help bring diversity of thought and better outcomes overall. Meridian uses gender-balanced recruitment panels and has implemented training that supports managers to build collaborative teams, create succession plans and understand the benefits of diversity within teams.
We operate graduate and apprentice programmes that are successfully attracting a balance of male and female candidates, reflecting an improvement in the number of women choosing technical careers.
However, some parts of our business are still predominantly male, in particular in our Engineering and Electrical functions where 74% of employees are male. However, our female GM of Generation and other senior female leaders within this predominantly male business area are great role models for women aspiring to join and lead these technical sides of the business. The relatively remote locations of our generation assets, combined with low staff turnover, means we see growth in gender diversity within our technical roles as a long game, but we continue to make gradual progress each year.
Gender pay
Gender pay equity is having the same or similar pay for different work of equal value, regardless of job holder gender.
We are committed to achieving pay equity for male and female employees in similarly-sized roles, with similar skills, experience and accountabilities. We monitor this very closely and continue to make good progress in minimising gender pay gaps across similar-sized roles. In most of our employee levels, the gap between the median male salary and female salary is less than 2.5 %. Taking into account the female representation and numbers of people in each pay-band, our weighted pay equity gap is -0.1%.
The gender pay gap is the overall gap in average pay rates across the organisation for women compared to men. It is impacted by the representation of gender at different levels of the organisation.
As part of the Mind the Gap initiative across New Zealand, where employers are encouraged to publicly disclose their pay gaps via the Pay Insights Hub, we have committed to disclosing our overall gender pay gap. This is currently 22% (Average) and 33% (Median). These results reflect a lower proportion of women in higher-paying mid-senior roles. As we progress toward our goal to achieve a more-balanced gender representation at every level of the business, and in particular increase the proportion of women in senior higher-paying roles, our gender pay gap will reduce.
