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Harassment, pay and glass ceiling spotlight consultancy gender hole

Special report: Consulting firms are grappling with large gender pay gaps

Kiran Bassi was excited and thrilled when she joined Aon in 2016 as a financial advisor. Within 12 months in the London office, she regularly asked inappropriate executive questions about her sex life and was groped by a colleague at Summer Social. She felt “mentally insecure” and emptied.

Bassi voiced her concern to her manager, a white man, who asked her if she had taken it upon herself by being quite “boisterous and very talkative”. She says he and the broader management team gave the men who molested her a “slap on the wrist” and later subjected them to a “performance review”.

“The whole thing really shook my self-esteem. I never got my confidence back up to that level, ”she says. “I realized how normal it is for her to subject you to a performance appraisal when you bring up a problem, especially if you are a woman and even more so if you are a woman of color.”

Consulting firms in the UK have in recent years announced the steps they are taking to solve the problems associated with male-dominated jobs. However, women continue to quit the job before they reach the higher level. only a limited number make it to partner and there are still large wage differentials at the top.

According to mandatory reporting to the UK government, many companies have a median wage gap between men and women of almost 30 percent. At Aon, for example, the wage difference last year was 29 percent – just like two years ago – and the difference in the average bonus payment was 63 percent. At PwC LLP, the median wage for women was 32 percent lower and the bonuses 60 percent lower. However, at PwC Services, which employs the vast majority of PwC UK’s 22,000 employees and all of whom have hired since 2004, the gaps were much narrower at 7% and 28% respectively.

The difficulty in retaining female talent is due in part to the fact that the industry rewards those who are very mobile and who travel for days or weeks to support clients, which can put women with family responsibilities at a disadvantage.

According to Anne-Marie Malley, Deloitte’s Managing Partner, Consultancy, senior management often rewards and encourages those who show established male trust in both clients and interview.

“Women regularly tell me all about the development opportunities they need before they can become partners, while men don’t,” she says. “And in the interview, we found that male candidates tended to perform better that day.”

Malley has set up an “allies network” within Deloitte’s advisory arm to educate leaders about the difficulties women can face in the workplace and how gender and racial biases affect their decision-making.

Managers are not taught the complexities of what women and people of color go through

Deloitte has nearly 50 percent representation of women at younger levels of the consulting business, but that breakdown drops to 25 percent at the partner level. Only 12 percent of Deloitte’s partners are from ethnic minorities and 0.5 percent are black. “I think a lot of it is about not having role models,” says Malley. “We realize that we are working in the right direction, but we still have more to do.”

Last week KPMG UK appointed two partners to temporarily run the company after an outcry over comments from its chairman, Bill Michael, dismissing the concept of unconscious bias as “total crap”. He later resigned.

Bassi, who now works for a small software company in the field of talent, branding and inclusion, says that in consulting you “often don’t have women to strive for”. The only partner in the office who raised concerns about sexual misconduct did not reach out to Bassi, which she was going through or offer assistance.

Aon says: “We spoke to Ms. Bassi about the allegations raised. . . and conducted a detailed investigation in accordance with our policies and processes. As an organization, we advocate an integrative culture and an environment in which all employees feel safe, respected and valued. “

Bassi eventually left her advisory role to work in another area. © Anna Gordon

The company says it has prescribed unconscious bias training for all colleagues and launched a “Speak Up” training module to “remind colleagues how important it is to express oneself and how to do it”. The pay gap is also being “actively addressed”.

Women in this sector highlight other issues as key factors holding back their progress – including inflexible labor policies and an out-of-hours culture that tends to exclude women with family responsibilities.

Tamzen Isacsson, managing director the Management Consultancies Association agrees that there is still a long way to go to diversity and inclusion.

She notes that across the industry, only 21 percent of partners are women. And while 22 percent of the advisors in the entry-level area come from black and ethnic minorities, only 8 percent of the partners do. Even then, Isacsson points out that overall there is an even lower percentage of black people in the industry, which is hiding broader “bame” statistics.

The MCA launched a Women in Consulting group in November – a forum where women can discuss obstacles and opportunities, whether all companies should set goals and which practices such as job sharing and mentoring work well.

Initiatives such as flexible work schedules have so far not done enough to restore the balance between women and people from ethnic minorities.

Much of the problem arises from a lack of understanding of what these groups need, says Bassi.

“Unless managers are in marginalized groups, they should be given tools to understand the lived experiences of these people,” she adds. “Managers just aren’t taught the complexities of what women and people go through with color.”

This article has been modified to reflect the difference in the gender pay gap between PwC LLP and PwC Services.