Inclusion & Diversity

Annual Report : Clients | Firm | People

At PwC, we are working towards an inclusive culture that values differences – one that allows us to be ourselves every day, and that empowers us to realise and discover our full potential.

We know that when we bring together the perspectives of individuals from diverse backgrounds, life experiences, preferences and beliefs, we can create better outcomes for our clients, people and communities.

Our strategy

Promoting Inclusion & Diversity (I&D) is an important part of our values and strategy.

We have a Partner who oversees I&D efforts and reports to the Country Management Team. There is also a team that drives I&D efforts throughout the year in line with our focus area of Valuing Differences, an effort we've supported since 2015 to guide us in creating awareness and continuing dialogue around unconscious biases.

Read about how we tweaked a popular I&D initiative that resonates with our people - Lunch with a Stranger - which received even more participation when we had to work from home; and a new I&D programme - the Inclusive Mindset Learning path.

Gender Targets

As part of a PwC network action on achieving better diversity, we will be working towards 45% partner admission for women and ensure proportionality of promotions for Senior Managers and Directors. Proportionality means that percentage of women promotees equals to the percentage of women at that particular level.

Our actions

In achieving our targets, we have worked across different parts of the firm to improve employee experience and talent retention.

We are constantly reviewing our policies and practices to find ways to enhance I&D at PwC, such as:

Expanding our talent pool to people with non-degree backgrounds and graduates from diverse disciplines
Promoting an inclusive culture in the firm with initiatives to encourage our people to appreciate and value differences in gender, background and ethnicity.

We also participate in national level programmes that support the advancement of women in the workforce:

30% Club Malaysia
- Pauline Ho, MYVN Chief Strategic Officer, leads a workstream of the 30% Club and spearheads a Board Mentoring Scheme to identify women who are board-ready, pairing them with experienced directors based on criteria such as professional experience and interests
- More than 60 women have gone through the 9-month mentoring scheme and 33% are on boards of listed and non-listed companies.
Career Comeback
- PwC Malaysia is a strong advocate of women returning to work
- We are active participants in the Career Comeback Programme run by TalentCorp.

Our results

We are proud of what we have accomplished through our I&D efforts. But we acknowledge that there is still much to be done. Our notable achievements include:

An inclusive workplace - 69% of our people believe that the leaders they work with actively build a diverse and inclusive work environment (Source: PwC Global People Survey 2021)
A diverse workforce with the following demographics:
- 43% of our Partners and 58% of our Managers are women (July 2021)
- 86% of our people are millennials or younger; and 11 are above 60 years old
- 6 ‘differently-abled’ colleagues (3 visually impaired, 2 with physical disability, 1 person of short stature)
- Workforce comprises people from 16 countries
- Recruited 20 women returnees since 2015 through the Career Comeback Programme
Winning the following awards:
- British Malaysia Chamber of Commerce (BMCC) Excellence Award for Diversity 2019
- TalentCorp's Career Comeback ReIGNITE Award 2018
- Best International Organisation, Life@Work Award 2017
- Special mention for Human Library, Life@Work Award 2017
- ACCA Malaysia Sustainability Reporting Award for Best Workplace, 2014 and 2015
- CEO champion, Life@Work Award 2014.

Lunch With A Stranger

Launched in September 2015, Lunch With A Stranger (LWAS) runs from April to November yearly to provide a platform for people from different departments to meet over lunch. This initiative helps us break down work silos, meet new people, dispel biases and stereotypes, and promote inclusion.

Each weekly session focuses on a topic that's relevant to our people, ranging from personal interests, wellbeing, International Women’s Day, and the PwC Values. We have hosted a diverse range of external guests as well: our clients, nonprofits, and even an image consultant.

In the last 2 years, driven by internal needs and the work from home situation, LWAS has evolved to be wholly virtual and includes a monthly session for parents to share their experiences, under the Parents Network. We now have more participants as people can join us no matter where they are and the sessions are livelier than ever.

	FY21	FY20	FY19
Number of LWAS sessions	28	32	32
Participants	923	536	399

I enjoy LWAS because I find this to be a great place to listen and learn from people who have real life experiences / knowledge in the topics discussed while hearing different viewpoints from other participants.

Associate, Consulting

I find LWAS a good initiative to close the gaps of working from home. I recently joined PwC during the MCO, and LWAS is helping me get to know my colleagues, not just from my team, but also from other departments. Looking forward to more LWAS in 2022!

Specialist, Tax

Addressing unconscious bias

In our effort to understand how our own preconceptions play out in the workplace, we have developed our own Unconscious Bias (UB) workshop and ran a pilot in 2018 for Directors and Senior Managers based on real-life examples and bias-prone areas in our talent lifecycle from recruitment to promotions.

Our desired outcome for the UB workshops is for our people to be aware of instances where bias can happen, so that their actions or decisions will be more inclusive. We also hope to improve retention and employee engagement and to better onboard experienced hires.

We ran 2 workshops in both FY20 and FY21. Outcomes were:

The majority of the participants who attended said the workshop addressed topics relevant to them. Course was rated 4.47 out of 5 by participants
We were able to improve understanding of UB for participants. A participant noted that the workshop gave them timely reminders and pointers and insights on how UB influences our decisions, perceptions and objectivity. They also highlighted tips they found useful to minimise UB which includes "Focusing on current facts and ability, and to be open and listen without judgement."

Going forward, we hope to improve on our UB workshops with an internal e-learn called ‘Inclusive mindset’, a training developed by PwC’s Inclusion & Diversity and Learning & Development teams. We hope to share outcomes of the training in our next reporting exercise.

Parents' Network

The Parents' Network aims to be an avenue for parents at PwC to support each other and receive support through different programmes which include:

Lunch with a Stranger x Parents: Riding on our Lunch with a Stranger (LWAS) initiative, we have LWAS x Parents sessions every last Thursday of the month, hosted by different parents on various parenting topics ranging from dad’s role as a parent to empty nest syndrome
Resource sharing: Monthly newsletters are sent to all parents at PwC which includes a summary of LWAS x Parents for those who missed the session, updates and parenting articles / promotions. Content on balancing work and family is also available through a shared Google Drive
Parenting Pals:
- A mentoring programme designed to connect soon-to-be/new/existing parents with experienced parents on themes related to juggling parenthood and career, launched in July 2019
- The objective of the mentoring relationship is to share guidance and insights on parenthood; give support to new parents in transitioning to their new ‘role’ at home, helping them navigate a significant life-changing period while balancing work demands; as well as helping to support the mental and emotional wellbeing of new parents
- We have a group of mentors covering different themes:
  - planning/pre-children (eg. conceiving, childbirth experience),
  - transition back to work (eg. reduced work week, juggling life as a working parent),
  - life as a parent (eg. working dad, single/young parent),
  - others (eg. schooling options).