Gender Pay 2019

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, and when structural factors are removed, we believe 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 2.93%. This is compared to the national gender pay gap of 17.9%. The mean hourly rate for women is lower than that paid to men by 5.02%. The mean gender pay gap has increased by 0.24% since our last report. There are two major factors that have been identified which contributed to this increase, they are:

Closure of our National Distribution Centre and Fabrication branches which were predominantly made up of male colleagues under median wage

Continued reorganisation throughout FY19

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 77.6% compared to 58.2% of women.

In Wolseley UK the mean bonus gap between males and females was 28.28%. The median was 21.09%. The mean gender bonus gap has decreased by 4.19% since our last report. One of the key reasons for this decrease 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 12.36% 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	77.5%	22.5%
Q3	81.5%	18.5%
Q4	83.6%	16.4%

 

We operate in what is a male dominated sector and are working to improve the male:female ratio across the organisation, but we acknowledge that 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 Quartile 2 and Quartile 3.

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:

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

Created attraction films to demonstrate flexible working for female colleagues.

Reviewed and updated our maternity policy - it relates to paid leave entitlement and how bonuses are paid to those on maternity or adoption leave.

Implemented a levelling structure to ensure increased transparency across all roles within our business as part of our Reward framework.

Updated facilities in branches, culture in offices and branches and introduced female uniforms.

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

We will be focusing on:

Producing additional content for our career's website and social media channels to attract more women to Wolseley

Unconscious bias training for our leadership and management teams as well as making it available for all our colleagues

The introduction of blind selection, meaning that we will remove names from CVs before being reviewed

A full recruitment audit with an independent organisation to help identify where we can do more to attract the best talent

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

William Wilson

 

 

In William Wilson, the women's median hourly rate is lower than that paid to men by 4.28%, which again compares well to the national average.

The mean hourly rate for women is lower than that paid to men by 6.72%.

In William Wilson, 68.7% of men and 58.3% of women received bonus pay.

Where a bonus was paid, women were awarded 25.8% more than men at the mean level. At the median, women were paid 58.16% more

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	69.8%	30.2%
Q2	64.2%	35.8%
Q3	79.6%	20.4%
Q4	79.6%	20.4%