The government has mandated that companies employing 250 or more employees must report their pay disparities based on gender by April this year. In 2016, the UK gender pay gap median was registered by the government at just more than 18%.
Basingstoke-headquartered marketing and print company Adare International has now released its own data at the behest of CEO Andrew Dutton, with a mean wage of 24.7% less for women and a median of 13.6% less. He attributed the inequality to women taking up of significant proportion (69.5%) of the lowest-paid quartile of jobs.
Gender balance drew closer further up the four designated quartiles, with women taking up 44.4% of the highest-paid jobs. According to Dutton, this share has increased since the data was recorded in April last year.
He said: “We hire and promote on the basis of a meritocracy and are delighted to see that our three highest-paid quartiles are relatively equal in gender representation.
“Our lowest quartile is quite female-dominated due to the nature of the jobs they take in warehouse and clerical work. These often fit well around certain circumstances particular to some groups of women, such as being well timed around childcare hours.
“We believe in equal pay for filling an equal role and have restructured our pay to reflect this and gain pay parity. The lowest quartile is where this will be a greater challenge.”
Adare International made two appointments to its board of directors in 2017 that Dutton said will reflect in improved results to be recorded for next year’s round of data. Tracy Ellison was appointed UK managing director in February and Sharon Frost joined as human resources director in October.
Companies are also required to post data on bonuses given out to staff. Adare International’s data revealed that women’s mean bonuses were on 69.8% lower, but the median bonus was 19.1% lower for women. Dutton said this data was unrepresentative due to government mandates on what constitutes a bonus.
“In our lower quartiles, we have historically given an attendance bonus,” he said. “This attendance bonus is small in comparison to the commissions we pay to our largely-male sales team which has skewed the results. Discounting those, the figures would be much closer together."
Dutton said that Adare International had “grown massively” over 2017, which had resulted in a number of new hires and promotions that would continue to lead to parity for genders.
He said: “I think we stand in a different position to a lot of the print industry as a print management firm with a female-heavy creative side. Print is quite a male-dominated industry, but this has not been our experience internally and we shall see how it differs when the rest of the industry reveals their own data.”
