New Zealand’s financial services sector is working to quantify its gender pay gap, with the Financial Services Council (FSC) coordinating a data collection effort across member organisations to build an industry-wide evidence base for future action.
The FSC’s Empower Women Working Group has been gathering gender pay gap figures from member organisations, asking them to use the Ministry for Women's Gender Pay Gap Toolkit to calculate and submit their results by March 31, 2026. The council plans to compile the submissions into an aggregated industry benchmark, though it has not confirmed when that report will be released. The FSC board endorsed the data collection effort, positioning pay gap reporting as a matter of corporate governance rather than solely a workplace diversity issue. Financial services has persistently ranked among the industries with the widest pay disparities between men and women in New Zealand, making sector-specific data a priority for the working group. The council has outlined that structural barriers, occupational segregation, and limited pathways to senior roles contribute to pay differences that can widen over the course of a woman’s career, with downstream effects on retirement savings and long-term financial security.
The working group’s next phase of work, once the data collection period closes, will centre on interpreting what the aggregated figures reveal. That includes identifying where disparities are most concentrated across the sector, whether in particular roles, levels of seniority, or organisational types, and determining where targeted action is most warranted. The FSC has said member organisations will be supported with practical resources and shared learnings drawn from the benchmark results. The council has also flagged an intention to establish a framework for monitoring change over time, though the specifics of that framework have not yet been detailed. The working group’s focus on senior-level representation and career progression reflects a broader understanding that the pay gap is not solely a product of hourly rate differences, but also of who holds higher-paying roles and how women move through organisations over time.
The FSC’s initiative is unfolding against a backdrop of measurable change in New Zealand’s overall labour market. Stats NZ reported in August 2025 that the national gender pay gap stood at 5.2% in the June 2025 quarter, down from 8.2% a year earlier. Stats NZ labour market spokesperson Abby Johnston described the shift as statistically significant. “The June 2025 quarter gender pay gap of 5.2% is the lowest since the series began in 1998. Annually, the gender pay gap declined by 3.0 percentage points, the first statistically significant annual decline noted since 2017,” Johnston said.
Johnston attributed the movement to wage growth among women outpacing that of men over the period. Women’s median hourly earnings rose $1.68, or 5.2%, to $33.76, while men’s median hourly earnings of $35.62 reflected a 1.9% annual increase that Stats NZ said was not statistically significant. “Increases in women’s median hourly earnings were seen across age groups, ethnicity, and occupation,” Johnston said.
For those working in insurance and financial services specifically, the Stats NZ data points to a notable shift. Women’s median hourly earnings in the financial and insurance services industry climbed $4.04, or 9.4%, to $47.23 in the year to June 2025 – the steepest rise across all industries tracked in that period. The gains extended across ethnic groups. Asian women recorded a 6.7% increase, rising $2.00 to $32.00 per hour. Māori women’s earnings grew $1.63, or 5.5%, to $31.33, while Pacific women’s hourly earnings increased $1.00, or 3.4%, to $30.00. European women saw a rise of $1.69, or 5.0%, to $35.39. Stats NZ cautioned that the headline 5.2% figure carries a sampling error of approximately 1.9 percentage points, placing the gap within a range of 3.3% to 7.1%. The data comes from the Household Labour Force Survey, which does not cover every person in New Zealand and carries inherent sampling uncertainty.
The FSC has framed the data collection phase as a foundation rather than an endpoint. Without a consistent, sector-wide measure, comparisons between organisations and tracking of change over time remain difficult. The working group’s push to standardise how member organisations calculate and report their pay gaps addresses that gap in available information. The council has not disclosed how many member organisations submitted data by the March deadline, nor the range of results received. Those details are expected to emerge when the aggregated benchmark is published. Whether the improvements reflected in the national Stats NZ figures translate into narrowing gaps within financial services organisations will become clearer once the FSC completes its analysis and releases its industry-level findings.
