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Gender Pay Gap Report 2021

What’s gender pay gap reporting?

Every year, employers with 250 or more employees must carry out and publish six statutory calculations under the Equality Act 2010 (Gender Pay Gap Information) Regulations 2017. Dreams must analyse pay information for those employees on 5th April 2020, so the relevant period was our April 2020 payroll data.

April 2020 was close to the start of a UK-wide national lockdown due to the Covid-19 pandemic. This has affected this year’s gender pay gap figures because furloughed employees on less than full pay were excluded from some, but not all calculations.

The gender pay gap shows the difference between the average (mean or median) earnings of men and women. Gender pay gap reporting is different to equal pay which deals with the pay differences between men and women carrying out the same jobs, similar jobs or work of equal value.

Pay gap and bonus gap

The bullet points below show the mean and median pay gap using the April 2020 pay data and the bonus gap for the 12-month period prior to 5th April 2020.

  • Mean pay gap: 1.64%
  • Median pay gap: 5.52%

We’re pleased to report that both our mean and median pay gaps are very low and much better than the national average. However, this calculation excludes those on furlough. By including these employees in the calculation our mean pay gap is 2.09% and median pay gap is -2.42%.

The bonus pay gap includes all employees, including those on furlough and for the period April 2019 to March 2020 our bonus pay gap is:

  • Mean bonus gap: -6.07%
  • Median bonus gap: -147.29%

The negative median bonus pay gap of -147.29% shows that the middle point of the women’s bonus figure was 147.29% higher than male amount. This is because of female employees working in parts of our business where the market rates are higher. It’s also due to females working predominately in retail and earning commission.

At 5th April 2020 the split of our workforce was 70% male and 30% female.

Bonus gap chart Gender of workforce

Dreams has a predominantly male workforce in two business areas: the distribution and manufacturing activities.

Bonus pay

This calculation shows the proportion of male and female employees that received bonus pay during the 12-month period ending 5th April 2020.

gender bonus

Each area of Dreams has its own bonus scheme and all our employees are eligible to earn a bonus. The 8% of males and 3% of females who didn’t earn a bonus in the year was mostly due to new starters in March and April not yet achieving targets.

Quartiles

For this calculation we rank employees by their rate of pay from lowest to highest and split the data into four equally split pay quartiles then present the number of men and women in each quartile.

Gender quartiles 2020

These quartiles excluded employees on furlough not receiving 100% pay, therefore an additional assessment was made to include these employees back in, to compare to previous years.

Gender furlough 2020
  • With a workforce split 70% male and 30% female, the quartiles including furloughed employees back into the calculation have a largely similar pattern.

Summary

We’re pleased to report that our gender pay gap is better than the national average, however we continue to review our recruitment and reward strategy and efforts are being made to ensure we continue to develop more female talent in our organisation and in all business areas.