Gender Pay Gap

Sustained commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion

Cochlear’s Mission is to empower people to connect with others and live a full life. We are committed to expanding access to implantable hearing solutions to enhance the lives of people with hearing loss across the globe. To achieve this aim we have need to ensure Cochlear is a reputable and sustainable organisation, now and into the future.

As a global business, we are committed to attracting and building a pipeline of diverse talent that is representative of our customers and the communities in which we operate. Diversity, equity and inclusion are an integral part of our corporate strategy which includes a focus on overcoming unconscious bias and building the capability of people managers to create an inclusive work environment for everyone and in doing this, reducing the gender pay gap.

Over the past 6 years we have made significant progress towards closing the pay gap. The 2023 WGEA Executive Summary includes our Australian-based employees only. It shows our total average remuneration gender pay gap is 12.6% (reduced from 22.4% in 2017) and the median is 16.3%.

A summary of other key diversity, equity and inclusion achievements are provided below.

We recognise the importance of continued focus and action and will continue to specifically focus on the following initiatives:

• Ensure equity in talent acquisition, development, succession and reward. To achieve this we will:
  • Continue to grow the diversity of our workforce through recruitment and selection practices which attract candidates from the widest possible pool of talent. This includes a focus on initiatives to attract broader candidate pools and support objective and inclusive processes and practices to support balanced recruitment outcomes across the company.
  • Continue to work on ensuring pay decisions for both new and current employees are fair and equitable. We will also continue to monitor outcomes globally to ensure equitable reward across genders.
  • Continued focus on succession through actively reviewing and managing our succession pipeline to ensure we have gender diverse bench strength with a strong focus on assessing potential for senior leadership and critical roles.
• We will continue to invest time in providing the education, tools and knowledge targeted to our people leaders, so that they lead through these processes to create and support a diverse and inclusive workplace and ensure all talent decisions including recruitment, performance evaluation, remuneration and career development opportunities are made free from bias and based on employees’ behaviours and performance.
• Continue to support flexible work practices to assist employees balance work and other personal and caregiver commitments.
• Continue to educate leaders and teams through our DE&I programs and monitor impact of these programs.

We remain committed to living our D&I principles and will continue to use data and listen and learn forums to help inform our future actions.