Gender pay gap report
On 5 April 2018, VGC (V G Clements Contractors Ltd) employed more than 250 employees. In accordance with The Equality Act 2010 (Gender Pay Gap Information) Regulations 2017 legislation we are pleased to publish our gender pay calculations.
Gender pay gap reporting shows the difference between the gross hourly earnings and bonus pay between men and women within each organisation.
At VGC, we have always prided ourselves on our commitment to equality, diversity and inclusion in the workplace. We strive to ensure that we have a diverse workforce, representative of the regions in which we work and the general population. We want our people to feel supported, safe, ambitious and able to achieve their potential in their chosen fields of work, regardless of background.
After undertaking the gender pay gap reporting exercise for the second year running we are pleased to report that there has been a decrease in the median difference of the hourly rate of pay between men and women from 27.11% in 2017 to 26.03% in 2018.
We have also seen a 29% increase in women working within the business in 2018 and an increase in the % of women in the lower middle and upper middle quartiles. We attribute this increase to our commitment to initiatives to encourage women into the industry throughout 2018.
Education and training:
- We provide our staff with diversity, inclusion and unconscious bias training as well as promoting fairness, inclusion and respect (FIR) throughout our workforce with trained FIR ambassadors.
Attraction:
- Our schools engagement programme aims to inspire girls to consider a career within the construction industry before applying for their GCSEs. We are extending this to include parental engagement. In 2018 we reached over 2700 students.
- We have eight STEM ambassadors.
- VGC works with female prisons HMP SEND, HMP East Sutton Park, HMP Drake Hall Thames Valley Community to help rehabilitate people back into society. We support employability events, advise on roles and education paths, and help with CVs and interview techniques. We are also supporting women on ROTL into work experience while serving their sentence.
Opportunity:
- We are currently drafting competency profiles and behaviours for all jobs in the business. We will use this to recruit, train and promote staff. This will open our roles and development opportunities to a wider pool of candidates. We believe this will result in more diversity within technical, engineering, sales and customer-facing roles.
Raising profile:
- Our skills and employment adviser gained her CSCS card and undertook a week’s work experience on a construction site to gain a better understanding of being a woman working on site. This has enables us to better understand how we can reach more women when advertising roles, provide better advice to women considering a career in construction, and open up the discussion about more support for flexible working on projects.
- Our skills and employment adviser was a guest speaker at Thames Tideway tunnels on International Women’s Day talking about working on site and flexible working.
- We work with Women into Construction to support women into construction through employment registration days and presenting on working in the construction industry.
- We encourage our staff to use LinkedIn to raise the profile of the work they do within the industry and to learn from others.
- In 2018 we were a supporter of the Construction News Inspire Me campaign aimed at encouraging more women into leadership roles.
VGC gender pay reporting
In accordance with the gender pay reporting legislation, our results are set out below. This information is accurate and is produced by our payroll software, which is compliant with gender pay reporting requirements.
V G Clements Contractors Ltd gender pay gap results as of 5 April 2018:
- Difference in hourly rate of pay – mean 31.06%
- Difference in hourly rate of pay – median 26.03%
- Difference in bonus pay – mean 59.95%
- Difference in bonus pay – median 48.92%
- Percentage of males who received bonus pay 86.32%
- Percentage of females who received bonus pay 70.00%
| Quartile | Men | Women |
|---|---|---|
| Upper | 100% | 0% |
| Upper middle | 99.21% | 0.79% |
| Lower middle | 96.85% | 3.15% |
| Lower | 93.70% | 6.30% |
While our second gender pay gap reports relatively small changes we understand that it will take time to see the impact of our 2018 initiatives. We will continue to drive forward to further decrease the gender pay gap within our own business and across the construction industry.
We will continue to monitor and report our diversity levels and work to better understand our gender pay gap challenge. We will continue to encourage female participation in all levels of our organisation.
Our existing and planned programmes, both those specifically for women and those which are part of our wider corporate social responsibility agenda will support the VGC Group in achieving our ambitions of a more diverse and ultimately more successful company.
Ciara Pryce
Group services director
4 April 2019