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Trade Me is minding the gender pay gap
Diversity, Equity & Inclusion
16 December 2025Trade Me’s purpose is to connect Kiwi to create the life they want. We know embracing diversity, equity and inclusion (DE&I) has a positive impact on our products and services. This helps us foster a greater sense of belonging at Trade Me and within communities across Aotearoa.
Our Focus
A key focus of Trade Me’s DE&I strategy is to reduce our gender pay gap. We pay all our people the Living Wage, we actively calibrate our pay and promotion discussions to prevent gender bias, and we’ve been taking a deliberate approach to achieve good gender representation for leaders and in other key areas.
We look at gender representation and pay
Despite reporting a reduction in our gender pay gap in 2024, we are disappointed that our overall median gender pay gap has increased to 15.2% this year. We continue to maintain strong gender representation across our leadership levels, with representation meeting our aspiration for 40:40:20 representation. We are particularly proud to have achieved 50:50 representation at our Executive level.
The primary source of our gender pay gap increase remains an imbalance in representation across the company. Simply put, we have fewer women in higher-paid roles and more women in lower-paid roles, and this imbalance has unfortunately worsened over the last year.
We achieve pay equity at Trade Me by having a highly standardised, robust pay practice. This practice ensures that different work of equal value is paid at the same rate regardless of gender.
Women in Technology
Over half of our entire workforce is currently employed in Technology roles. Consistent with wider industry trends, these teams have a significantly higher proportion of men. Because this represents the largest segment of our business, we have identified Technology as the key area of focus required to effectively shift our overall gender pay gap (GPG).
Since 2022, we have applied a data-driven, experiment-based approach to create systemic change. Our objectives are to maintain the percentage of women in technical roles, double the percentage of technical leaders who are women, and ultimately eliminate our GPG.
We are proud that this focus is already driving results. To date, we have increased the percentage of women who apply and are interviewed, increased the percentage of promotions awarded to women, and decreased our technology-specific gender pay gap. Furthermore, the introduction of our Special Measures Policy has been particularly successful, leading to a rise in women in technical leadership roles from 12% to 20%, even though we have not yet seen a shift in overall representation of women in technology roles more generally.
How we’re continuing to tackle our gender pay gap
- Robust pay practices: In 2025, we are reviewing our pay practices to ensure there is no bias in our frameworks and the application of those frameworks.
- Regular reporting: We are committing to establish a GPG working group to track and review data every 4-6 months to identify any growing or emerging trends so we can take early action.
- Inclusive recruitment practices: We continually review our recruitment practices to ensure we best practices from application through onboarding to eliminate bias from our process. This includes using inclusive job language, running standardised interviews with trained panels, promoting unconscious bias training, and actively engaging with under-represented community groups.
- Women in Tech programme: As well as continuing with our Special Measures policy and external networking to attract more women into senior roles, we are supporting our internal women in tech through a range of initiatives including development programmes, pair programming and the establishment of our women in technology employee network group.
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