Any gender pay gap is a pay gap too big. Whilst we’re seeing female colleagues progress and a larger proportion of our promotions have gone to women in this period, we still have more to do to reach equality of representation at senior levels and pay. This year saw us launch many initiatives to move this agenda forward further and I am confident we’ll see an improvement next year.
Stuart Price, Chief People Officer
Gender Pay Gap reporting requires legal entities with more than 250 colleagues to report and publish their pay gap between males and females.
Zenith Group has a number of employing legal entities. Of these, two companies have more than 250 employees:
- Zenith Vehicle Contracts Limited
- Contract Vehicles Fleet Services Limited.
This year, alongside the mandatory requirement, we’ve also supplied a voluntary pay gap submission for Zenith Group, which comprises of colleagues across all our employing entities.
We’ve done this as we believe this is consistent with the spirit of the gender pay gap reporting legislation, and looking at the data in this way supports our aim to reduce the pay gap across all areas of our Group.
Zenith Vehicle Contracts Limited
At the snapshot date of the 5th April 2021 we had 487 colleagues within this legal entity. We have reported on this legal entity since 2017 so have several years to compare against.
Gender pay gap
Zenith Vehicle Contracts Limited - bonus pay gap
Proportion of colleagues receiving a bonus payment
Commentary
Our pay gap has increased by 3% (mean) and 2.7% (median). The difference is driven by the increase in males occupying the upper quartile (3%). Since April 2021, which cannot be seen in the data, we’ve made a number of senior female hires and we expect this to improve next year.
Our bonus gap has increased by 14% (mean) and 13.8% (median). This increase was due to a higher proportion of the colleague bonus scheme being paid to all colleagues for the first time since 2017. As we’ve a male-dominated upper quartile, the impact on the bonus pay gap has been significant. In addition to this, 11% of colleagues in this entity are part-time, of which 83% are female. Whilst part-time working is known to support female advancement, it does in this case negatively impact the bonus pay gap as the bonus calculation does not allow for making full-time equivalent comparisons.
Contract Vehicles Fleet Services Limited (CVFS)
In September 2020, we acquired two businesses from administrators of the Cartwright Group and TUPE transferred colleagues into our Contract Vehicles Fleet Services Limited (CVFS) legal entity. This is our first-year reporting on CVFS. Due to the timing of the acquisition, we’re unable to report on the bonus pay gap as we don’t have access to full records for the period.
At the snapshot date of 5th April 2021, we had 270 colleagues within this legal entity.
CVFS - gender pay gap
Commentary
For our first-year submission, we’re encouraged that the pay gap is below our group average. The focus for this entity is about improving the proportion of females within each of the pay grades, in addition to looking at ways we can develop and grow females in the lower quartile to move up through the quartiles.
Group wide overview – voluntary submission
At the snapshot date of 5th April 2021 we had 1045 colleagues across all of our employing entities.
Group wide overview - gender pay gap
Group wide overview - bonus pay gap
Group wide overview - proportion of colleagues receiving a bonus payment
Commentary
As this is the first year of reporting from a group view, we’re unable to draw comparison to previous years. However, we’re aware that a large factor in our pay and bonus gap is due to the proportion of males occupying our upper quartiles.
We recognise that whilst our mean bonus pay gap is significant, our median is 0%, which shows that we have an equitable bonus scheme in place and the mean pay gap is largely driven by the number of males in senior roles. We’re actively making steps to increase the percentage of females at this level, and in the last 12 months, we’ve appointed a number of females into key leadership roles.
Our industry is traditionally male dominated. We know we fair comparatively with our peer organisations across the sector. However, we aspire to be a leader in diversity, inclusion and equality and we’ll continue to take steps to develop and recruit more females into senior roles across our group.
Within the reporting period we’ve seen progress, with 52% of all colleagues recruited being female and 9.5% of internal promotions have been awarded to female colleagues compared to 7.5% male.
Whilst there’s still some way to go, we believe we’ve the right plans in place to reduce our gender pay gap further.
What we’ve already done:
- Launched our new agile working policy across the organisation, which has given flexibility and choice as to where and how colleagues work – we know this has particularly benefitted female colleagues aspiring to develop their careers
- Rolled out a development programme for future female talent, which included seven female colleagues
- Introduced our Inclusion strategy from the CEO, set up a newly-formed diversity committee and launched six new colleague-led, Board-sponsored focus groups (one of which specifically focuses on gender)
- Began a menopause support group.
What we’ll soon be rolling out:
- Working with an external diversity, equality and inclusion expert, we’ll roll out an education programme to focus on creating a culture of conscious inclusion – starting from the top of the organisation cascading to all colleagues
- Develop a reward framework, including a robust salary benchmarking process to ensure consistent and equitable pay across the organisation
- Carry out a full recruitment review to identify opportunities to create a more inclusive candidate journey. This includes exploring the use of more inclusive language in our job adverts and ensuring managers are equipped with the right training to carry out an inclusive recruitment process
- Review our agency preferred supplier list and select agencies that have a proven record of supporting businesses with their inclusion agenda
- Carry out a deep analysis on our gender pay gap results and make recommendations for change and improvement
- Implement the recommendations from our newly formed gender focus group.
How the Gender Pay Gap is calculated
* The mean is the average of all the numbers in the dataset i.e. adding all the relevant pay and bonus figures and then dividing by the total amount of relevant employees.
** The median is the numerical value which splits the top 50% of the population from the bottom 50%. This is calculated by listing all the values in numerical order; if there is an odd number of values, the median is the number in the middle; if there is an even number of values, the median is the mean of the two central numbers.