Gender pay gap report 2022
About us
Pilgrim’s Food Masters is one of the UK and Ireland’s leading food companies.
We retain a strong portfolio of branded products and a customer brand offering with a leading chilled and frozen ready meal business. Our brands include Richmond, Denny, Galtee, Fridge Raiders and Rollover. We also serve the UK market with authentic ethnic chilled and frozen ready meals, multi-cuisine ready to cook ranges, and home delivery meals.
We are committed to becoming the best and most respected company in our industry, creating the opportunity of a better future for our team members.
Gender pay gap reporting
Since 2017, private organisations with more than 250 employees are legally required to report every year on six different measures of gender pay. The pay information contained in this report is from 5 April 2022.
Gender pay gap is the difference between the average hourly rate received by men and women and is not a comparison of pay rates for men and women doing work of equal value.
Definitions
Median pay gap is the difference between the middle hourly salary of men and women, when all salaries are lined up from lowest to highest.
Mean pay gap is the difference between the average hourly earnings of men and women.
Our gender pay gap
Our median gender pay gap for 2022 is 5.4% which is an improvement of almost two percentage points (pps) on the previous year. This also compares positively against the Office of National Statistics (ONS) median pay gap 8.3% in April 2022. This means that on the snapshot date of 5 April 2022 women earned 95p for every £1 that men earned, and improvement on the previous year where women earned 93p for every £1 earned by a male team member.
Our workforce is made up mainly of men, with 62% of our team members being men, and 38% women. This balance means that the mean and median data can be sensitive to small changes. Even a small shift in women’s roles and associated pay can have an impact on the overall gender pay gap reported percentages either positively or negatively.
In our 2022 gender pay gap report women occupied 31% of the highest paid jobs (the upper hourly pay quarter), this is almost a two percentage point increase on the previous gender pay gap report. There was also a significant year on year increase in the women in the upper middle hourly pay quarter with the percentage of women increasing from 30.1% to 35%. In the lower hourly paid quarter, women occupied 47% of the lowest paid roles, up from 45.1% in the 2021 gender pay gap report.
Whilst the percentage of women in the lowest paid quarter has increased slightly, more women are moving into the two highest paid quarters. The total percentage of women in the upper middle, and upper quarters has increased from 29.7% to 33% since the last gender pay gap report.
Why we have a gender pay gap
Women are well represented in senior and mid-level leadership roles – correlating with the two highest pay quarters (31% of those in the upper quarter and 35% in the upper middle quarter are women), however there are fewer women in these quarters than the business as a whole (38%). This translates into a gender pay gap.
A large proportion of our business is orientated toward production roles which have traditionally been occupied by men and where it remains common to have a higher proportion of men – this is a significant factor in the gender balance of our organisation.
Our bonus pay gap
For the 12 months preceding the snapshot date, 14.3% of women and 11% of men received bonuses in our organisation. This is an increase for both genders since the last gender pay gap report where 6.9% of women and 5.9% of men received bonuses. Year on year the percentage of women who receive bonuses is increasing at a greater rate than the percentage increase for men.
In 2022, the mean bonus pay for women is 33.3% lower than a men’s, compared to 17.3% lower in the previous report. The median bonus pay has changed from 5.5% in the last gender pay gap report to 95.5%.
Why we have a bonus pay gap
As is evident in the reported data for 2021 and 2022, our mean and median bonus pay figures are highly sensitive to small changes. As an example, based on our 2022 data, the median bonus pay percentage could swing from the negative gap for women reported, to no gap with a less than 0.6% shift in the gender balance of our organisation. Whilst the data is sensitive, we acknowledge the figures we are reporting and have carried out analysis to understand the reasons behind them, and identify if we could improve.
Our commitment
As an organisation, we are committed to diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging (DEI&B) and are continually working to ensure we have people practices that support us to recruit, retain and develop the best people for our roles regardless of sex, age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage and civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion or belief or sexual orientation.
Despite large parts of our organisation having roles that are traditionally occupied by men, women occupy a wide range of roles including production roles, junior and middle management, senior leadership and director posts, with a number of women working in traditionally male-led areas such as finance. Going forward we would like to see the presence of women increase further in areas where they are currently underrepresented. We support the development of our team members through talent and succession planning and leadership programmes to enable them to progress to more senior posts and improve their earning potential.
Over the last year we have increased our focus on DEI&B and have conducted our first DEI&B survey to gain an insight into how we are currently performing and where we can improve. Our DEI&B team have worked closely with our leadership team to come up with commitments that are now being actioned. These commitments include learning and development opportunities, rising awareness, the implementation of additional benefits, and changes of ways of working to better support women and in the workplace.
At Pilgrim’s Food Masters, as part of our commitment to reduce our gender pay gap, our leadership teams will continue to analyse our gender pay gap data and seek out opportunities to improve. We are invested in the continued improvement of our people practices, in listening to our team members through our engagement surveys and in supporting progress in relation to diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging to ensure that all our team members have the opportunity of a better future.
Declaration:
The data contained in this report is accurate and has been calculated in accordance with the requirements of the Equality Act 2010 (Gender Pay Gap Information) Regulations 2017.
Matthew Collington
HR Director