Gender Pay 2023

Wolseley Gender Pay Gap Report 2023

At Wolseley, one of our core company values is fairness and respect. We believe that regardless of how we identify, our background, or our circumstances, we all deserve the opportunity to develop our skills to our full potential, whilst working in a safe, supportive, and inclusive environment.

We are committed to ensuring that equality, diversity and inclusion are at the very heart of our business through our Fairness and Respect Board. Through this, we listen to and work with our colleagues to identify where we can make improvements to create an environment where our colleagues feel happy and comfortable working here.

This report outlines our gender pay gap and the actions we believe will help us to reduce the gap and further embed a truly inclusive culture at Wolseley.

We are pleased that we continue to see a higher female representation in the business in this report compared with last year, with women comprising 20.8% of the workforce compared to last year’s figure of 20.0%. This highlights some of the success against our commitments made in previous reports to continue to attract and retain female talent within Wolseley.

Wolseley Group Limited wholly owns several operating legal entities, all except one (Wolseley UK Limited) do not employ more than 250 employees. In line with last year, Wolseley UK Limited continues to employ more than 250 employees and so this report’s focus is on Wolseley UK Limited, referred to as ‘Wolseley’.

What is the gender pay gap?

The gender pay gap is the difference in mean (average) and median pay between men and women. The median calculation means if all male and female salaries were listed highest to lowest, we would look at the two 'middle' salaries and compare the difference between the two.

Gender pay gap reporting should not be confused with Equal Pay, which is a legal requirement and looks at whether a group of people carrying out similar duties are paid fairly compared to one another. Wolseley is an Equal Pay employer.

Our gender pay gap

As with last year, Wolseley are delighted to state that our mean gender pay gap has reduced by 3.0% (from 4.5% last year) to 1.5% in this report. Our gender pay gap under the median calculation has remained at 1.0%.

We believe that the following continue to contribute towards our gender pay gap being substantially better than the national gap:

• Our minimum pay rate was set at 33 pence per hour more than the National Living Wage in April 2023 (the snapshot date for this year’s report)
• All colleagues, regardless of age are paid our full adult pay rate, rather than the lower tiers permitted under National Minimum Wage (including our apprentices)
• An effective grading structure and disciplined pay management ensures consistency across our distributed business operations.

Whilst our mean pay gap has improved, we are not complacent and strive to ensure that we maintain and reduce both the mean and median pay gap within Wolseley.

Our gender bonus gap

For the reporting period April 2022 – March 2023, the proportion of men at Wolseley paid a bonus during the period was 61.1% compared to 67.9% of women.

At Wolseley, we are again pleased to report the mean bonus gap between males and females has reduced by 8.0%, to 31.5% (from 39.5%). In this report, the median bonus for women is 4.8% higher than for men (last year it was 13.4% higher for men than for women).

Salary quartiles

The legislation requires us to identify our overall pay range, divided into equally sized quartiles and populated with the proportion of men and women colleagues in each quartile. This is set out below:

	Percentage of men	Percentage of women
Upper	81.2%	18.8%
Upper middle	78.6%	21.4%
Lower middle	77.8%	22.2%
Lower	79.1%	20.9%

 

Merchanting is traditionally recognised as a male-dominated sector but as demonstrated, we are continuing to work hard to improve our male-to-female ratio across the organisation. We know that many factors play into this, and it is not something we can change overnight and we remain committed to improving this ratio, but it may take some time before we see significant change.

How are we working to address this?

We want to continue to improve the gender balance of our workforce. We will do this by attracting the best female talent to the business, whilst encouraging and nurturing the talent we already have.

We have a number of actions and initiatives to achieve this, but as with any change programme, sustained improvement takes time.

We have:

• Participated in the FTSE Women Leaders review, on a voluntary basis since being invited as one of the 50 largest private companies within the UK
• Increased the number of applications from women by using better advertising campaigns
• Increased the number of shortlisted female candidates at recruitment stage
• Enhanced maternity pay to support with the attraction and retention of women in the business
• Objectively reviewed all flexible working requests and challenged managers to consider alternative ways of working, which are supportive of the needs of all colleagues
• Continued hybrid working arrangements in some parts of our business, to enable colleagues to achieve a better balance between work and home life
• Reviewed our induction to better support colleagues in their first year and on their return to work from extended leave
• Placed greater focus on wellbeing within the business through various Company led initiatives

Additionally, we are continuing to focus on:

• Our website and social media platforms – keeping a focus on positive female representation, and utilising the internal collaboration platform for colleagues, Viva Engage (previously known as Yammer), allowing the creation of working groups for ‘Women of Wolseley’ to encourage female role models within the business
• Identifying and removing any potential for unconscious bias and will be introducing mandatory unconscious bias training in our onboarding process
• Promoting a flexible approach to work – supporting part-time options, job-share and flexible working hours
• Further developing diversity and inclusion training as part of our mandatory suite of core training for all colleagues, including for example, menopause awareness

In conclusion

We have made further progress on last year’s report, which we are proud to celebrate, however, we know we still have more to do. We welcome the opportunity to share the details of our gender pay gap so that we, along with other responsible companies, can strive to be representative of the communities in which we live and work.

Sarah Broughton
Chief HR Officer