"About IDP Education

IDP Education is a global organisation listed on the Australian Stock Exchange. Although headquartered in Melbourne, we employ more than 7000 people globally and operate in more than 30 countries with different languages, beliefs, social systems and business practices. Just over 10% of our team are based in Australia.

We believe having a diverse workforce is one of our greatest competitive strengths, working together to deliver exceptional experiences for our customers and clients, and enabling us to bring together the best talent and ideas to grow our global business. We aspire to have a workplace that is fair and inclusive, where differences are valued, and our business is strengthened by the wealth of experiences that reflects the diversity of the communities and customers we serve.

Our gender pay gap

Gender equality has long been part of our inclusion, diversity and equity efforts, recognising that women represent the majority of our global workforce. The IDP Board and our Global Leadership Team remain committed to improving gender equality across our organisation so that all our people have the opportunity to grow in their role and maximise their earning potential, regardless of gender.

In recent years, we have cemented this commitment by becoming a signatory to the HESTA 40:40:20 vision and receiving the WGEA Employer of Choice for Gender Equality citation in 2023.

We are confident that women and men in our teams globally, are paid equally for same or comparable roles. This assumption is tested annually through our global pay equity audit program. However, we know that gender pay equity and the gender pay gap are different measures and that pay gap can be impacted by several contributing factors common across many industries, such as women and men working in different jobs and overall workforce composition.

IDP’s Australian median gender pay gap for total remuneration and base salary has seen an overall decline over the three years to 2023, reducing by more than 17% for both measures. The median gender pay gap for total remuneration is 24.6% and median gender pay gap for base salary is 28.5%. This is a positive indication of the work we have been undertaking over a number of years and the commitment from all our people at all levels of the organisation to make lasting change.

Through analysing our data, we know that our gender pay gap can be attributed to our overall workforce composition, which shows a concentration of women in the lower pay quartiles, impacting our gender pay gap in Australia. We are pleased to see more balanced proportions of men and women in the upper pay quartiles, reflecting our deliberate actions to improve the gender balance at senior levels of the organisation.

Action and progress

While the gender pay gap for Australian employees is steadily improving, we know we still have work to do.

WGEA emphasises Gender Equality Indicators (GEI), that represent the key areas in which progress towards gender equality can be achieved. We know that to deliver real change on gender equality means doing things differently at all touch points of the employee experience, and we have initiatives that focus on each of the GEI within our global inclusion, diversity, and equity strategy. Our progress against these measures is summarised below.

Governing bodies

Since committing to the HESTA 40:40:20 vision in 2021, we have achieved our short-term target to achieve balance across our Board of directors. In the past eighteen months, IDP has appointed two female non-executive directors, and a female CEO and Managing Director to our Board. Board composition of non-executive directors is currently at 37.5% female representation.

Workforce composition

IDP regularly reviews the data on our workforce composition globally, regionally and at the country level. Through this we know that women make up the majority in the lower levels of our organisation and that men are the majority across more senior positions. Over recent years, we have taken deliberate action to focus our efforts on strategic initiatives that increase the proportion of women at senior management levels. These initiatives are global programs and do not solely focus on our Australian workforce.

Key areas of focus have been ensuring gender-balanced participation in the recruitment process, targeted leadership and coaching programs for senior women and succession planning to accelerate the pipeline of women into senior leadership roles. We remain committed to achieving our long-term 40:40 targets for gender balance within our senior management levels.

Equal pay

IDP runs a global pay equity audit program that ensures each country within our global operations conducts a gender pay equity audit at least every three years. Supported by our global People Experience team, country and regional leadership teams are responsible for developing and implementing action plans in response to findings from the program as required. The fulfilment of this program is reported annually to our Board of directors. We remain confident that men and women in our teams are paid equally for same or comparable roles.

Lasting structural change takes time, and we are committed to continually taking positive actions and measuring our progress to reduce the gender pay gaps for all our people." Tennealle O’Shannessy, Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director