At Howard Kennedy, we are committed to nurturing an inclusive culture where everyone can thrive and feel empowered to be themselves. We believe equity matters – our people should have the opportunity to fulfil their potential in an environment grounded in fairness, respect, and opportunity. We call this the space to be extraordinary.
To monitor progress against our Diversity, Equity and Inclusion commitments, we use pay gap analysis as one of our key measures. We use these insights help us evaluate our strategy and make informed adjustments, while enabling us to review and assess our long term progress.
The Gender Pay Gap ('GPG') measures the difference between the average hourly total pay for all men versus all women at an aggregate level across an organisation. The Firm has a continuing commitment to reduce the pay gap further at both the mean and median level.
The Ethnicity Pay Gap ('EPG') measures the difference between the average hourly total pay for all white colleagues versus all ethnic minority colleagues, at an aggregate level across an organisation. The EPG reporting is entirely voluntary, and it is calculated using the same methodology as the GPG reporting to help us compare progress, year-on-year. This means everyone from an ethnic minority background (e.g. Black, South Asian) is grouped and compared to anyone who identifies as white. We recognise there are differences across ethnic groups and limitations of this grouping.
This year, we are also publishing the partner GPG and EPG for transparency. The employee gender pay gap saw an improvement in the mean (15.8% in 2025 vs 20.1% in 2024) and a small decrease in the median (33% in 2025 vs 34.9% in 2024). The ethnicity pay gap for employees increased, with the mean pay gap increasing from 7.1% to 7.5% and the median from 4.1% to 30.3%. At partner level the gender pay gap improved markedly, with the mean gender pay gap reducing from 39.3% to 23.4% and the median from 33.8% to 12.7%.
Our strategy
To achieve sustained progress in closing our gender and ethnicity pay gaps, we remain fully committed to our long-term strategy. We recognise that meaningful change takes time and that progress may appear incremental as we build the foundations for lasting impact.
A key focus is increasing diversity in senior, higher-paid roles. We are investing in development programmes to strengthen our talent pipeline and attract diverse candidates into leadership positions. These include:
- Inspire at HK, developing management and leadership competencies of the Firm's leaders within a collaborative networking environment
- HK Mentors, provides access to internal mentoring relationships, supporting progress towards personal development objectives and increasing the internal profile of mentees
We continue to provide transparency around our pay philosophy, including publishing our pay bands for each level. We are also committed to transparency in our pay practices. We publish pay bands for each level and aim to standardise pay ranges for comparable roles, while accounting for the market value of different specialisms.
Our ability to understand our workforce makeup, and therefore report on our data in its most complete form, relies on the strength of our demographic data. This is underpinned by the completeness of our workforce demographic data which we collect through our voluntary self-identification process.
Our annual pay gap reporting provides an important measure of progress. While our figures show we still have work to do, particularly around representation within our workforce we are making progress. We remain focused on driving long-term, meaningful change.
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