In 2017 the UK Government introduced regulations for gender pay gap reporting for companies in the UK. The regulations are intended to encourage employers to take informed action to close their gender pay gaps where one exists.
Using the snapshot date of 5th April 2019, as required by the regulations, we have published our gender pay data for our UK workforce. This includes all our UK legal entities and includes all relevant employees.
The gender pay gap shows the difference between the average hourly earnings of men and women across the workforce, irrespective of their role. Its purpose is about addressing the representation of women in the workforce.
It is worth highlighting equal pay is different to gender pay gap. Equal pay is about whether a woman and a man performing the same work, at the same level, in the same organisation receive the same pay and is legislative requirement with which we comply and is not further addressed in this report.
There are a number of calculations that we report in our gender pay gap data:
This compares to our 2017 Gender Pay Report which reported a 20.6% median pay gap and a 27.6% mean pay gap.
To provide some context to the figure, we have reviewed our male / female split within our teams. Overall, we currently employ circa 30% more men than women. When we break this down further, in our Production areas where we employ most people, we have approximately equal numbers of males and females employed and our mean pay gap in this discreet population is 8.6%. Due to the nature of the production roles we find more females are employed in roles which do not attract shift premium which we believe is a key driver for the pay gap.
We therefore believe our pay gap is significantly driven by our staff and managerial roles where we employ around 2 times more males than females. Due to the nature of our business, these managerial and staff roles are predominately filled with people who have qualifications and experience in engineering and STEM related fields. It is this background that we believe has led to a smaller pool of female talent being employed and hired.
All employees continue to have an equal opportunity to participate in the programmes which make up the bonus calculation. However, at the snapshot date for this report, our most commonly accessed bonus program, had a criteria which was in part, linked to sickness absence. We therefore believe the proportion of female employees receiving a bonus is lower than males (8.3%) as a direct consequence of sickness absence levels in females versus males. Since January 2019 we have changed the rules of the bonus program and the direct link to sickness absence has been removed. As a result, we believe going forward the proportion of females receiving a bonus will be equal to the proportion of males receiving a bonus.
Bonus gender pay gap (earned in 12 months preceding 5 April 2019). These figures show the mean (average) and median (mid-point) bonus gap.
The mean (average) bonus gap has continued to reduce since 2017 and 2018 to 45.1% but the median gap overall has increased to 48.3%. When we break this down further, we noted within the Production areas the median gap is 0% and the mean gap is 15.3%.
As a result of this analysis, we believe the reason for the ongoing bonus gender pay gap is because we have fewer women in staff and management roles and more specifically we have fewer women in senior roles that attract higher levels of pay and the scale of the bonus potential is greater.
The charts below show the gender distribution across our UK business in four quartiles based on pay bands.
At the snapshot date (5th April 2019) there has been improvements since 2017 in the representation of women in all quartiles except the upper quartile where the representation level remains unchanged.
| Pay Quartile | Women | Men |
| Participation in 1st quartile | 70.8% | 29.2% |
| Participation in 2nd quartile | 53.1% | 46.9% |
| Participation in 3rd quartile | 32.8% | 67.2% |
| Participation in 4th quartile | 17.2% | 82.8% |
We are committed to addressing the gender pay gaps reported in this report and one aspect of this is to ensure our frameworks and policies are supportive of attracting, developing and retaining our employees. To support this, we are continuing to develop our internal reward and compensation practices and will ensure these continue to be fairly applied across males and females. We ensure there is equal access to learning and development opportunities for all employees and offer family leave and flexible leave policies designed to balance the demands of caring for dependants.
We also recognise the need to continue to increase the number of females we hire and promote in staff and managerial roles to become a more diverse organisation and have greater access to the available talent pool.
The method for calculating the gender pay gap figures has been outlined by the UK Government and the results from every qualifying UK organisation will be published here.
We confirm the information and data reported is accurate as of the snapshot date 5 April 2019.
