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 2022, so the relevant period for this assessment was our April 2022 payroll data.
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 2022 pay data and the bonus gap for the 12-month period prior to 5th April 2022.
Dreams mean and median pay gaps are low and much better than the national average, like for like comparisons of previous years are difficult due to furlough periods.
The bonus pay gap includes all employees, for the period April 2021 to March 2022, our bonus pay gap is:
The negative median bonus pay gap of -178.7% shows that the middle point of the women’s bonus figure was 178.7% 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 2022 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 2022.
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 is mostly due to staff turnover, and new joiners 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 exclude all employees not receiving 100% pay.
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 furlough periods in previous years. Dreams 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.
