Jiten Kotecha KPMG : Employment Law And Gender Pay Gap

Before Jiten Kotecha became Senior Counsel, Labour & Employment at Cummins, he spent five years inside KPMG UK. From 2013 to 2018, his work as an employment lawyer included gender pay gap reporting. That is an unfortunate speciality to have sitting on the CV when your own employer is publishing a gender pay gap large enough to require its own fucking postcode.

KPMG is the kind of place businesses hire when they want somebody expensive to explain a problem professionally. Audit teams, tax advisers, lawyers and risk consultants occupy glass offices while corporate panic is fed into a machine and returned as methodology, guidance and a deck thick enough to stop a door. Somewhere inside that apparatus sat Jiten Kotecha.

His public career background records him at KPMG from 2013 to 2018 as an Employment Lawyer, advising clients across employment law and gender pay gap reporting. By then, Kotecha was already an experienced solicitor, having been admitted in 2010. Meanwhile, gender pay gap reporting was becoming serious corporate business, with large employers approaching the point where glossy statements about equality would finally have to sit beside actual numbers.

KPMG was ready. It had specialists, spreadsheets and five-step plans. Unfortunately, it also had employees.

Welcome back to Jiten’s Jobs.

KPMG Sells The Tape Measure

In December 2016, KPMG published guidance for employers preparing for mandatory gender pay gap reporting. The document offered a “five step plan to ensure compliance”, covering the systems, calculations, workforce definitions and data employers needed to control before exposing the numbers to public view.

This is the professional-services machine operating at full temperature. Government creates a reporting obligation, corporate anxiety rises a few degrees and KPMG appears carrying a PDF. Mean pay, median pay, bonuses, quartiles and payroll data can all be chopped into manageable pieces, checked by specialists and pushed through a process until management understands exactly what has to be published.

For clients, that expertise had obvious value. A badly understood reporting regime could quickly become a legal, reputational and employee-relations headache. Consequently, KPMG had every reason to understand the measuring equipment.

There was only one awkward design feature.

The tape measure worked both ways.

The Tape Measure Comes Home

KPMG says it voluntarily began publishing its gender pay gap in 2015, before statutory reporting became compulsory. Once the measuring equipment was pointed back towards the building, its median basic gender pay gap was 21.4%.

That was not a decimal point sleeping behind the stationery cupboard. It was a substantial organisational gap inside one of Britain’s biggest professional-services firms while KPMG was developing expertise around employment law, workplace equality and the reporting of precisely this kind of disparity.

The statutory figures subsequently made the picture even easier to read. For the 2017 reporting snapshot, the Government’s official gender pay gap service recorded KPMG UK Limited with a 22.1% median hourly pay gap and a 22.3% mean gap.

Better still, the Government translated the median calculation into language suitable for anybody who had escaped the consultancy industry. Women earned 78p for every £1 earned by men at the median.

Mind the fucking gap.

Take The Lift

The pay quartiles are where an abstract percentage starts developing architecture. Women represented 56.1% of KPMG employees in the lowest-paid quartile, yet only 33.2% of employees in the highest-paid quartile were women.

There is the building plan. At the lower end of the salary structure, women formed the majority. Take the lift towards the highest-paid quarter and the population changes considerably. Nobody needed an undercover camera, a leaked spreadsheet or a nervous source from Payroll smoking behind the bins because KPMG had already done the arithmetic itself.

More importantly, KPMG’s own reporting identifies representation across the organisation as a major part of the machinery behind its gender pay gap. Women were less represented in senior positions, while greater concentrations of female employees could be found lower down the organisational structure.

In other words, the gap was not merely sitting in Payroll.

It was standing in the fucking org chart.

The Spreadsheet Is Not An Equal Pay Judgment

A gender pay gap is not the same thing as an equal pay violation. The published figures do not establish that KPMG unlawfully paid individual women less than men for performing equal work, and treating an organisation-wide statistical measure as though it proved that would be sloppy.

The accurate version is considerably more interesting anyway. Gender pay gap reporting measures differences across an organisation, so the distribution of men and women across grades, functions and levels matters enormously. Put more men into expensive senior chairs while women are concentrated further down the salary structure and the gap appears even where equivalent roles receive identical pay.

That was precisely why the reporting regime mattered. Instead of another corporate photograph featuring six carefully selected people pointing happily at a laptop, employers had to publish numbers exposing the actual shape of the workforce.

KPMG’s numbers showed a shape.

And it was top-heavy with men.

Then Come The Bonuses

Base pay was only one tray arriving from the kitchen. The Government’s 2017 figures showed that 85.8% of women and 86.2% of men received bonus pay, meaning the proportion receiving bonuses was broadly similar.

Then somebody opened the envelopes.

Women’s median bonus pay was 27.6% lower than men’s, while the mean bonus gap was 51.3%. Again, those figures describe organisation-wide distributions rather than an individual equal-pay finding, but they show just how violently seniority, role and reward can stretch the numbers across a large workforce.

That is precisely the sort of thing an employer might pay a professional-services firm to analyse.

KPMG did not need to hire one.

It already was one.

Five Steps To Compliance, One Awkward Mirror

Now place KPMG’s consultancy guidance beside KPMG’s own workforce figures. On one side sits the professional process: prepare systems, understand the calculations, identify the relevant employees, assemble the data and publish.

On the other side sit women making up more than half of the lowest-paid quartile and roughly one third of the highest, alongside a median hourly gap above 22%, a median bonus gap above 27% and a mean bonus gap above 51%.

This is where corporate compliance becomes accidentally revealing. The methodology can be immaculate, the definitions checked, the calculations validated and the correct logo placed neatly on the cover. At the end of it all, however, the spreadsheet still gets to ask why so many of the expensive chairs contain men.

There was no sixth step in KPMG’s five-step guide.

There probably should have been.

Look up from the fucking spreadsheet.

Jiten Kotecha Was Working In Precisely This Field

This is where Kotecha comes properly into focus. His public career background specifically identifies gender pay gap reporting among his employment-law work during his five years at KPMG.

That puts him in an interesting professional environment. An employment lawyer was developing expertise in a transparency regime while working inside an organisation providing a remarkably useful live demonstration of what that regime could expose.

KPMG could tell clients what needed measuring, explain how the calculations worked and prepare employers for publication. Its specialists could discuss the business implications and help organisations understand what a large disparity might say about workforce structure.

Meanwhile, KPMG’s own figures were already sitting in the building waiting to be introduced.

Sometimes the case study is across town and requires a taxi. Sometimes it is already waiting at your own fucking desk.

2018 : Bring In The Partners

KPMG then went beyond the statutory employee measure. Its 2018 pay gap report also published broader figures incorporating equity partners, bringing considerably more of the money at the top of the organisation into view.

The result was spectacular.

Across partners and employees, KPMG reported a 42% mean gender pay gap and a 28% median gap. The 42% figure was not KPMG’s statutory employee median. It was the broader mean measure incorporating partners and employees, which makes it useful for a different reason.

Once partnership earnings were folded into the view, the average gulf became enormous.

The employee-only numbers remained ugly enough without any assistance. KPMG reported a 22.6% median basic-pay gap, a 29.2% median bonus gap and a 48.7% mean bonus gap in 2018, while women accounted for 34.1% of the highest-paid employee quartile.

The lift had moved slightly.

The penthouse remained rather fucking masculine.

The Professional Services Magic Trick

There is a peculiar corporate spectacle in selling expertise around a problem your own organisation is still struggling to solve. KPMG could advise employers to identify their gaps, understand the structural reasons behind them and prepare for what disclosure might mean for recruitment, retention, reputation and employee relations.

At the same time, its own numbers were demonstrating exactly why those questions mattered.

The consultancy had effectively diagnosed the consultancy.

This was not some obscure discrepancy hidden three decimal places down an appendix. Women represented a majority of the lowest-paid quartile in the 2017 figures and roughly a third of the highest-paid one. Bonus disparities were substantial, senior representation mattered and the broader partner-inclusive calculation eventually produced that 42% mean gap.

KPMG had the methodology.

It also had the specimen.

Reporting The Gap Does Not Fill The Gap

Professional-services firms love measurement because measurement converts something messy into something manageable. Give a problem columns, percentages and a reporting date and suddenly everyone can gather around a conference table and speak fluently about strategy.

The difficulty is that a percentage remains a percentage when the meeting ends. Publishing a 22.1% median pay gap does not make it smaller, while explaining the structural reasons does not alter the structure. A beautifully formatted report about female representation at senior levels does not magically put more women into those positions either.

That is why the disclosure matters. It prevents the brochure from having the last word.

KPMG could talk about inclusion.

The spreadsheet could answer.

Then Jiten Left, And The Gap Improved

Kotecha’s five-year KPMG stint ended in 2018.

KPMG’s 2018 report put the employee median basic-pay gap at 22.6%. In its 2019 report, that figure had fallen to 18.6%, a four percentage point reduction in a year.

The movement continued over the longer term. By 2025, KPMG said its median basic gender pay gap stood at 15.7%, compared with 21.4% when voluntary reporting began in 2015.

KPMG can have the smaller number. After ten years of reports, programmes, targets, specialist expertise and enough equality language to wallpaper Canary Wharf, however, the gap was still sitting comfortably in double digits.

For Jiten’s Jobs, the chronology is particularly tidy. His KPMG chapter ends in 2018 with a reported employee median gap of 22.6%.

The subsequent reports take it down.

Jiten left. The gap narrowed. Those are the dates.

Five Years Inside The Machine

Kotecha spent five years at KPMG before leaving in 2018. By then, he had travelled a long way from trainee-solicitor territory and was practising employment law inside one of the world’s largest professional-services networks, where regulation becomes advice, advice becomes product and corporate problems become billable expertise.

Gender pay gap reporting is almost the perfect little exhibit from that world. Government requires employers to reveal the distribution of money across their workforces. KPMG helps companies understand how. KPMG then measures itself and discovers that the answer is substantially less elegant than the methodology.

Five years at KPMG. Employment law. Gender pay gap reporting. A firm telling employers how to measure the divide while its own figures showed women clustered more heavily below and men dominating the expensive end of the building.

The consultants had the methodology. The employment lawyers had the regulations. The partners had the upper floors.

And at the 2017 median?

The women had 78p.