KPMG focuses on diversity
KPMG has admitted that the class, gender, ethnic and sexual orientation of it staff does not reflect the make-up of wider British society or its client base.
And in order to begin addressing the oversight, it has unveiled a detailed diversity profile of its 11,500 staff. The Big Four firm also announced targets over the next three years to benchmark itself and recruit and develop its workforce accordingly.
“The diversity profile of the workforce across the professional services industry does not reflect society or our client base. We need to change and I believe a crucial part of achieving a meaningful shift is providing more transparency of the make-up of our current staff against where we would like to be. It’s uncomfortable but we need to step up and be open and honest about the challenges we face. Greater transparency means we can be scrutinised against the targets we set ourselves. It means we can test the success of our inclusivity programmes and demonstrate that we are serious about this issue,” said Simon Collins, KPMG’s UK chairman.
“We certainly don’t underestimate the scale of the challenge we have set. For example, we need to double the number of female audit partners to hit our gender target. Our overall numbers on ethnicity are good but, for example, we know we need to do much more to support black professionals as less than 1% of our partners are black,” he added.
Stephen Frost, KPMG’s head of diversity and inclusion said: “We are determined to have the best visibility of our staff’s diversity profile within our industry. In July, we asked our staff to complete a diversity profile, which included race, gender, disability, sexual orientation and education levels. We are now confident that we have the best understanding of our staffing mix, comparable to public sector organisations which have led the way historically.
“In positive news, 93% of the firm completed the form on a voluntary basis but there’s still work to do. For example, a meaningful number of people are unwilling, or feel they are unable, to disclose their sexual orientation.”
Source: accountancyage- KPMG focuses on diversity
