A third of new KPMG partners women – but chair wants more
Consultancy giant KPMG yesterday announced 52 new partners, pushing the total number over 600 and improving the firm’s gender balance at senior levels.
A third of the new promotions are women – in comparison to only 15 per cent of KPMG’s existing partners. The firm said that it made particular efforts to bring in more women to senior roles.
KPMG said this meant creating company-wide long-lists, rather than looking on a team-by-team basis. It also meant looking at candidates over a three-year timeframe, rather than the usual one year, in an effort to abolish a “first cab on the rank” mentality about which candidates were next in line for promotion.
A narrow majority of the hires are international promotions, with 29 existing KPMG employees climbing the ranks – 23 are external hires.
KPMG’s UK chairman Simon Collins added that there was more work to be done on gender diversity at the highest levels of the company: “While we have seen results internally, there is more work to be done on our external hires, hence our introduction of assertive diversity benchmarking on all external agencies we use.”