Gender Pay 2020

Wolseley UK Gender Pay Gap Report 2020

In March 2020, the UK Government Equalities Office and the Equality and Human Rights Commission took the decision to suspend enforcement of the gender pay gap reporting for 2019-20. This was in recognition of the unprecedented uncertainty and pressure faced by employers from the impact of the coronavirus (COVID-19) global pandemic.

Wolseley UK welcomes this support from the UK Government. The last year has been extremely tough for many UK businesses, ourselves included. However, we wish to continue to share our gender pay gap reporting for 2020 to ensure we remain focused on this important issue, while acknowledging the clear impact the pandemic has had on our business overall.

We see the report we share below as an opportunity to share the ongoing work we're doing to address our gender pay gap, to assess our progress against our peers and to understand where we can continue to learn from other organisations who lead the way.

Here at Wolseley, colleague reward is designed to be gender-neutral and the gaps between the pay and bonus of male and female colleagues are strongly driven by the structure of our workforce. It continues to be the case that at Wolseley UK and across the wider merchanting industry, proportionally there are fewer females in senior roles. In our business, when structural factors are removed, we believe the differences in colleague reward are then related to individual performance, experience, and skill sets.

This report’s focus is on Wolseley UK, but we also report for our separate William Wilson business (which is a separate UK entity), and this can be found at the end of this report.

What is the gender pay gap?

The gender pay gap is the difference in median pay between men and women. This 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 UK is committed to being an Equal Pay employer.

Impact of the global coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic

Wolseley UK’s markets, like many other companies across the UK and wider world, have and continue to be impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. In April 2020, to recognise the substantial fall in demand for our services due to UK lockdown, we placed over 2,000 of our employees on furlough. Furlough saw these colleagues take a period of temporary leave from employment, driven by economic circumstances which we faced.

Irrespective of salary, colleagues who were furloughed were guaranteed to receive at least 80% of their monthly earnings for the duration of the time they were on furlough. For some colleagues this continued for around three months. We also went further to ensure we maintained all hourly pay rates above the National Living Wage.

Our gender pay gap

For this report we are reporting for all employees, including the 39% of colleagues who went on furlough in April 2020. We have taken their salaries to be what they would have been paid had they not been on furlough, to ensure we are reporting like on like, year on year, and can demonstrate the transparency of our approach, irrespective of the pandemic.

In Wolseley UK the women’s median hourly rate is lower than that paid to men by 2.16%. This an improvement from 2019 when the median was 2.93%. This is compared to a national UK gender pay gap in 2020 of 15.5%¹.

The mean hourly rate for women is lower than that paid to men by 5.84%. Our mean gender pay gap has widened by 0.82% since our last report.

One key factor that has contributed to this increase is an element of our salary sacrifice schemes, where a scheme allowing additional holiday to be purchased has had a greater take-up in the female population this year than last year, where 20.3% of the female population participated compared to 10.2% of males. Salary sacrifice schemes reduce hourly rates of pay in lieu of benefits received.

During 2020, our mean gender pay gap has increased slightly, but we remain among the very best performing companies in terms of Gender Pay equality and our median gender pay gap has reduced. 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 have historically reviewed 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.

While our median rate has improved, this reduction in our mean rate for the gender pay gap does demonstrate that we have more work to do.

Our gender bonus gap

The proportion of men in Wolseley UK paid a bonus was 85.2% compared to 69.1% of women. This proportion is broadly consistent with our figures from last year and our bonus schemes are generally not based on personal performance (excluding sales schemes).

In Wolseley UK, the mean bonus gap between males and females was 31.53%. The median was 24.23%. The median gender bonus gap has risen by 3.14% since our last report, which reflects a slightly lower number of female colleagues in our business this year compared to last year.

Salary quartiles

The legislation would normally require 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. This is included below

Wolseley UK

	Percentage of men	Percentage of women
Q1	82.0%	18.0%
Q2	77.9%	22.1%
Q3	79.1%	20.9%
Q4	84.3%	15.7%

 

Merchanting is recognised as a male-dominated sector but we are working to improve our male-to -female ratio across the organisation. We know though, that many factors play into this and it is not something we can change overnight. We remain committed to doing better in this ratio, but it may 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.

How are we working to address this?

We know that we need to improve the gender balance of our workforce. We will do this 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
• Increased the number of shortlisted female candidates at recruitment stage
• Continued unconscious bias training for our leaders and we launched a diversity and inclusion online training module for all colleagues
• Endeavoured to use diverse interview panels to support any senior recruitment activity  
• Objectively reviewed any flexible working requests and challenge managers to consider alternative ways of working which are supportive of the needs of all colleagues but particularly female colleagues
• Re-launched our approach to help us better identify talent in our business, including colleagues encouraged to express a wish to progress their careers
• Ensured that our key need to prioritise support for female colleagues is addressed in that talent management process
• Relaunched our induction to better support colleagues in their first year and on their return to work from extended leave
• Improved our flexibility, aiming to offer true flexibility when recruiting so that employees are able to adjust their schedules around other needs in their life, such as childcare, school pick-ups, urgent hospital appointments and so on. This is part of our overall bigger aim of working to create a positive workplace culture, where the company places more emphasis on overall productivity and performance rather than counting hours spent at a desk
• Focused part of our flexibility approach on 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 female colleagues, who can increase the number of days’ holiday they can use over school holidays or where additional time is needed at home.

Additionally, we are focusing on:

• Our website and social media platforms – keeping a focus on positive female representation, roll-out of the internal social media collaboration platform for colleagues, Yammer, allowing the creation of working groups for ‘Women of Wolseley’ to encourage female role models within the 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 – this will be supported by the implementation of a new HR system
• Promoting a flexible approach to work – supporting part-time options, job-share and flexible working hours
• The introduction of Women in Leadership development network with a sponsor from our Leadership Team
• Include diversity and inclusion training as part of our mandatory suite of core training for all colleagues.

Our gender pay gap in William Wilson

• In William Wilson, the women’s median hourly rate is lower than that paid to men by 0.02% which is a decrease from 2019 of 4.26%, which again compares well to the national average.
• The mean hourly rate for women is lower than that paid to men by 10.98%, which is higher than the 6.72% reported last year.
• In William Wilson, 67.7% of men and 54.7% of women received bonus pay.
• Where a bonus was paid, men were awarded 9.12% more than women at the mean level. At the median, men were paid 1.08% more.

Salary quartiles

The legislation would normally require 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. This is included below for William Wilson:

William Wilson

	Percentage of men	Percentage of women
Q1	78.2%	21.8%
Q2	68.5%	31.5%
Q3	68.5%	31.5%
Q4	88.9%	11.1%

 

In conclusion

As a Leadership Team at Wolseley UK, we know we have more to do to reduce our gender pay gap, continuing to create an environment where our female colleagues can thrive.

We are strongly committed to proactively challenging ourselves, every day, about the underlying reasons for our gender pay gap and working collaboratively across our business, with a joint HR and operational approach, to address it.

Jane Connor
HR Director – Wolseley UK