Gender Pay 2018

Gender pay gap report

We welcomed the introduction of mandatory gender pay gap reporting. It gives us the opportunity to share the work we’re doing to address our gap, to assess our progress against our peers and to learn from other organisations.

Our approach to colleague reward is gender neutral by design. So, we are confident that any gaps between males and female pay and bonus are driven by the structure of our workforce - proportionally we have fewer females in senior roles. When structural factors are removed, differences in reward can be explained by individual performance, experience and skill sets.

What is the gender pay gap?

The gender pay gap is the difference in median pay between men and women. Put simply, if all male salaries were listed highest to lowest, and all the female salaries were categorised in the same way, we would look at the two ‘middle’ salaries and compare the difference between the two. This is not to 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. Here at Wolseley UK, we remain committed to being an Equal Pay employer.

We have two UK entities – Wolseley UK and William Wilson. While the focus here is on Wolseley UK, we have also reported on William Wilson which can be found at the bottom of this report.

Our gender pay gap

In Wolseley UK the women’s median hourly rate is lower than that paid to men by 1.78%. This is compared to the national Gender Pay Gap of 18.4%.

The mean hourly rate for women is lower than that paid to men by 4.70%. The mean Gender pay Gap has increased by 2.32% since our last report. There are 3 major factors that have been identified which contributed to this increase, they are:

Salary sacrifice schemes, where the introduction of a new scheme allowing additional holiday to be purchased has had a greater take-up in the female population where 18.4% of the population participated compared to 8.6% of males. Salary sacrifice schemes reduce hourly rates of pay in lieu of benefits received.

Large scale reorganisation throughout FY18.

Turnover – partly due to the reorganisation, the average hourly rate for females leaving the business was £1.71 higher than females coming into the business (£12.84 compared with £11.13). The difference for males was £0.27 per hour.

If we remove the most significant factor in the increase, which is turnover, and concentrate on same store staff then the differential was £0.01.

While we are disappointed that our Gender Pay Gap has increased we are proud that we remain among the very best performing companies in terms of Gender Pay equality.

We believe that the following contribute towards our gender pay gap being smaller than the national gap:

Our minimum branch pay rates are 30 pence more than the National Living Wage, and we review our rates two months ahead of the legislative requirement.

Colleagues under 25 years’ old are paid our full adult pay rate, rather than the lower tier permitted under the National Living Wage.

An effective grading structure and disciplined pay management ensures consistency across our distributed business operations.

Our gender bonus gap – more to do

The proportion of men in Wolseley UK paid a bonus was 89.4% compared to 89.5% of women.

In Wolseley UK the mean bonus gap between males and females was 32.47%. The median was 33.45%. The mean Gender Bonus Gap has increased by 10.6% since our last report. One of the key reasons for this increase is that we have fewer women in senior roles, and the majority of these are based in our Support Centres, where over the last few years bonus schemes have paid out at minimal levels.

The median Gender Bonus Gap has fallen by 14.22% during the same period.

In addition to having fewer female colleagues in senior roles, we also have fewer women in our sales and branch management roles where bonus is a core part of remuneration.

Salary quartiles

The legislation requires us to identify our overall pay range, divide this into equally sized quartiles and populate these with the numbers of men and women colleagues in each quartile:

Wolseley UK

 

	percentage of men	percentage of women
Q1	83.1%	16.9%
Q2	75.5%	24.5%
Q3	78.1%	21.9%
Q4	83.4%	16.6%

 

We operate in what is a male dominated sector and are working to improve the male:female ratio across the organisation, but acknowledge this will take some time before we see significant change. The majority of our lower quartile roles are based in our branches and distribution centres, whilst most female colleagues are in Q2 and Q3.

What we are doing about it?

We know that we need to improve the gender balance of our workforce. We can do that by attracting the best female talent to the business, while encouraging and nurturing the talent that we already have. Over the last couple of years, we have put in place a number of actions and initiatives to achieve this, but as with any change programme sustained improvement takes time.

We have:

Increased the number of applications from women by using software and social media to target them to attend candidate attraction events.

Relaunched our induction to better support colleagues in their first year and on their return to work from extended leave. We also run these sessions regionally, to minimise colleague travel.

Targeted a higher proportion of females onto our development programmes to increase our future female talent pipeline.

Improved our flexibility when it comes to working hours. For example; continuing the practice of allowing colleagues to purchase extra holiday. Experience in our business and other companies indicates that this is particularly attractive to women who can increase the number of day’s holiday they can use over school holidays or where additional time is needed at home.

And we are focusing on:

Our website - with a dedicated careers site, to help attract the best talent to our business, with a focus on positive female representation.

Our maternity policy - especially as it relates to paid leave entitlement and how bonuses are paid to those on maternity or adoption leave.

Our reward framework - we are implementing a levelling structure to ensure increased transparency across all roles within our business.

The environment that women work in, particularly around facilities in branches, culture in offices and branches and female uniforms.

Continuing to identify and remove any potential for unconscious bias in our employment and promotion practices

As a Leadership Team, we’re committed to proactively challenging ourselves about the underlying reasons for the gap and working across our business to address it.

Sally-Anne Griffiths
HR Director

Our gender pay gap in William Wilson

 

 

In William Wilson, the women’s median hourly rate is lower than that paid to men by 1.06%, which again compares well to the national average.

The mean hourly rate for women is lower than that paid to men by 6.14%.

In William Wilson, 86.9% of men and 79.0% of women received bonus pay.

Where a bonus was paid, women were awarded 16.40% more than men at the mean level. At the median, women were paid 46.15% less.

Salary quartiles

The legislation requires us to identify our overall pay range, divide this into equally sized quartiles and populate these with the numbers of men and women colleagues in each quartile:

William Wilson

 

	percentage of men	percentage of women
Q1	79.6%	20.4%
Q2	63.7%	36.4%
Q3	66.7%	33.3%
Q4	80.0%	20.0%