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, employed on 5th April 2021, so the relevant period for this assessment was our April 2021 payroll data. National lock down due to the Covid-19 pandemic continued in 2021, this has significantly altered this year’s figures as furloughed employees on less than full pay were excluded from some of the calculation.
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 or similar jobs, or work of equal value.
The bullet points below show the mean and median pay gap using the April 2021 pay data and the bonus gap for the 12-month period prior to 5th April 2021.
Although both our mean and median pay gaps are very low and much better than the national average, furlough has affected these figures for the last two years, making it difficult to use like for like comparisons.
The bonus pay gap includes all employees, including furloughed employees for the period April 2020 to March 2021, our bonus pay gap is:
The negative median bonus pay gap of -120.2% shows that the middle point of the women’s bonus figure was 120.2% 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 2021 the split of our workforce remained unchanged at 70% male and 30% female.
Dreams has a predominantly male workforce in two business areas, distribution and our bed factory manufacturing.
This calculation shows the proportion of male and female employees that received bonus pay during the 12-month period ending 5th April 2021.
Each area of Dreams has its own bonus scheme and all our employees are eligible to earn a bonus. The 5% of males and 4% 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.
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.
These quartiles excluded employees on furlough not receiving 100% pay, therefore not a like for like compare to previous years.
We are pleased to report that our gender pay gap remains better than the national average, however our year on year data comparisons are not representative due to furloughed periods during the pandemic, 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.
