PwC UK, part of the world’s largest professional services firm, has published figures for the first time on the pay gap for black, Asian and minority ethnic workers, revealing they are paid on average 12.8% less than other employees.

The findings also reveal a bonus gap of 35.4%. The firm said the numbers show that while BAME and non-BAME employees are paid equally, the differences appear at senior levels.

PwC’s senior partner and chairman Kevin Ellis said that in publishing the figures the firm hoped to “shine a spotlight on ethnicity” in the workplace and replicate the benefits from publishing gender pay figures.

“We need to start looking beyond the narrow lens of gender, otherwise true workplace diversity won’t be achieved.

“While progress has been made, many barriers still exist in today’s businesses which means people aren’t able to reach their full potential. The more we understand what these barriers are and why they exist, the quicker we’ll be able to work towards creating truly inclusive organisations.”

Ellis added: “While our analysis shows that we pay our BAME and non-BAME employees equally for doing equivalent jobs, it does reveal that we have an imbalance at the senior levels of our business.

“Our priority is to do all we can to retain our junior BAME talent and improve rates of progression to senior management levels. We’re aiming to achieve this through stronger accountability across our business to deliver our gender and ethnicity targets, monitoring our pipelines on a more regular basis and making sure that all of our people can benefit from the most stretching of client engagements.

“We are also talking to our BAME employees to understand their sense of working at PwC to see if there are any barriers we can address.”