Diversity and inclusion

Meridian’s Belonging Policy outlines our target for overall gender balance of 40% women, 40% men, and 20% any gender across the organisation. 

We also have ongoing commitments to achieve gender balance across leadership and senior roles. 

At an operational level, Meridian is striving to achieve more than 40% representation of women across the workforce, through initiatives which will enable progress toward the following more-specific gender targets. These targets are: 

Diversity by gender by career level FY25

As at the end of FY25, 45.4% of employees across the Meridian Group are women, as are 40% of our people leaders. Females also comprise 57% of our Board and 30% of our Executive Leadership Team. At senior management level, just under 30% (29.7%) are women – we want to increase that. 

To further improve gender balance at all levels, each year we aim for 40% of our new hires being men, 40% women and the remaining 20% being of any gender. We’re also closely monitoring the retention of women who are already in our leadership roles and will respond with appropriate initiatives if an adverse trend arises. 

We are also continuing to develop programmes to improve our gender balance. We believe that increasing gender diversity will help bring diversity of thought and better outcomes overall. Meridian uses gender-balanced recruitment panels and implemented training that supports managers to build collaborative teams, create succession plans and understand the benefits of diversity within teams. We operate graduate and apprentice programmes that are successfully attracting a balance of male and female candidates, reflecting an improvement in the number of women choosing technical careers. 

However, some parts of our business are still predominantly male, in particular in our Engineering and Electrical functions where 82% of employees are male. However, our female GM of Generation and several other senior female leaders within this predominantly-male business area, are great role models for women aspiring to join and lead these technical sides of the business. The relatively remote locations of our generation assets, combined with low staff turnover, means we see growth in gender diversity within our technical roles as a long game, but we continue to make gradual progress each year. 

Gender pay equity is having the same or similar pay for different work of equal value, regardless of job holder gender. 

The gender pay gap is the overall gap in average pay rates across the organisation for women compared to men. It is impacted by the representation of gender at different levels of the organisation. 

The table shows the difference between full-time, full-year equivalent median and average base salaries and the total remuneration of Meridian employees by gender, regardless of the nature or seniority of work. The overall FY25 median gender pay gap, while still large, has improved from FY24.  

Meridian has an ongoing focus on increasing the number and proportion of women at senior, higher-paying levels of the organisation. This will help to address the overall current gender pay gap, which is largely an outcome of gender representation differences in roles at different levels. Meridian also reviews its salary data to ensure that there is no inappropriate pay gap (i.e. not due to performance, skills, experience, etc.) between men and women performing roles of similar size, type and seniority. Comparing the median salary of men and women in roles of a comparable size and nature, Meridian has a minimal gender pay gap at most job levels. The median gender pay gap (by ‘Position in Range’ across roles of similar size) is 0.4 percent.

Meridian welcomes employees from a diverse range of ethnic backgrounds, and our goal is to be representative of the ethnic makeup of Aotearoa based on census data. In particular, we would like to encourage more Māori and Pacific Peoples to join us.  

The table below shows our current progress against these targets.  

Ethnicity Representation

We encourage our people to let us know which ethnicity they identify with, so that we can track our progress in ethnic diversity. Of those employees who have disclosed their ethnicity, 4.8% are Māori and 2% are Pacific Peoples. 

We would like the proportion of our employees who have notified us that they are Māori and Pacific Peoples to be reflective of the representation of those ethnicities in the overall NZ population. We acknowledge and are concerned that the types and levels of roles that most Māori and Pacific Peoples within Meridian fill are our lower-paying roles, which results in larger ethnicity pay gaps for our Māori and Pacific Peoples employees, compared to our other employees.  

Ethnicity Pay Gaps

The Mind the Gap initiative across New Zealand also encourages employers to disclose their ethnicity pay gaps (for Māori and Pacific Peoples. 

Meridian is committed to attracting more Māori and Pacific Peoples employees into the workforce, at all levels. As part of that, Meridian monitors the ethnicity pay gap in two target ethnic groupings, against pay of employees of other ethnicities. There is a minimal Māori and Pacific Peoples ethnicity pay gap (~1.5 percent) against all roles of a similar size. However, comparing median salaries across all roles, the larger ethnicity pay gaps indicated reflect that many of our Māori and Pacific Peoples employees are in lower-level (and therefore lower-paying) roles. Our diversity initiatives aim to address this over time. 

We’re committed to finding ways to attract more Māori and Pacific Peoples into the company, and growing our capability to understand and be supportive of Māori and Pacific Peoples in our workplace. We want to be in a stronger position to hire and/or develop employees of these ethnicities into our more senior, high-paying roles.