Gender Pay Gap Report 2017

Gender Pay Gap Report 2017

Mindshare recognises the clear benefits of a diverse and gender balanced workforce, so we are disappointed that our gender pay gap percentage is 0.7% above the national average. It is our priority to ensure we are progressive on this subject and clearly the figures below show we have work to do.

Gender Pay Gap reporting is a new requirement under UK law. The gap is calculated by adding all salaries by gender into a single calculation to find an average per hour pay for each gender – the ‘gap’ being the difference between the overall average male and overall average female pay. This calculation includes all salaries at all levels.

This is a separate issue to equal pay, which is the legal requirement for people carrying out the same or similar work to be paid equally, regardless of gender.

All employers with 250 or more employees who are based in England, Scotland or Wales must report Gender Pay Gap figures including all employees on the payroll: If your organisation is a single ‘relevant employer’ and runs multiple payrolls (for example payrolls for different departments or business functions), you must merge relevant data from all your payrolls and report one set of figures for your organisation.

Mindshare is therefore reporting figures including its own UK-based employees and UK-based employees in GroupM Global and GroupM EMEA Regional Management.

The breakdown of the figures is as follows:

Gender Pay Gap:

	Mindshare + UK Based GroupM Global & EMEA Regional Management	Mindshare Excluding UK Based GroupM Global & EMEA Regional Management
Mean	32.23%	23.40%
Median	22.22%	19.10%

Bonus Pay Gap:

	Mindshare + UK Based GroupM Global EMEA Regional Management	Mindshare Excluding UK Based GroupM Global EMEA Regional Management
Mean	86.81%	66.51%
Median	24.74%	2.04%

% of Staff Receiving Bonus:

	Mindshare + UK Based GroupM Global EMEA Regional Management	Mindshare Excluding UK Based GroupM Global EMEA Regional Management
Male	83.54%	84.02%
Female	85.03%	84.33%

Notes:

• Gender Pay Gap based on hourly rates of pay as at 5^th April 2017.
• Bonus Pay Gap based on bonuses paid in the 12 months prior to 5^th April 2017.
• The national average median gender pay gap is 18.4% (source: Office for National Statistics).
• Mean (average when adding up all salaries / bonuses and dividing by total number of salaries / bonuses)
• Median (the middle salary / bonus when looking at all salaries / bonuses in a series)
• Search official gender pay gap website here for other companies’ reported figures.

To lend further context to these figures the table below shows the percentage of males and females employed by Mindshare in the UK (including UK-based employees in GroupM Global and GroupM EMEA Regional Management) at different levels of seniority.

Quartile	% Male	% Female
1st Quartile	36	64
2nd Quartile	48	52
3rd Quartile	43	57
4th Quartile	66	34

Note: 1^st quartile = least senior and 4^th quartile = most senior.

The balance between male and female employees in the fourth quartile is crucial - despite there being more female than male employees across all the other quartiles. In short, the greater proportion of men than women in this last quartile creates the gender pay gap.

At Mindshare, we are focusing on this point to ensure that we have the most progressive policies in place to support and encourage more women into the senior levels of our business:

1. Flexible working: We know that flexible working benefits many employees. We already offer flexible working programmes for those wanting to amend or reduce their hours (for example a ‘work from home day’ policy) and we are building on this by encouraging working from home and training our managers to support this initiative.
2. Shared Parental Policies: Alongside flexible working, and our enhanced maternity and paternity policies, we also operate shared parental policies. Our internal research demonstrates that males are reluctant to work part-time or take longer periods of family leave and we want to champion that everyone can and should take it. Last year we increased our enhanced maternity and paternity pay and enhanced our shared parental pay so that it mirrors our maternity policy. We will promote and encourage the uptake of this in all our workforce.
3. Equal Opportunity Promotions: We are implementing a formal promotion process giving everyone equal opportunity to apply for all roles – meaning every single role will be advertised internally and candidates assessed equally for each level.
4. Unconscious Bias: We offer unconscious bias training to all our staff and our manager training programmes contain unconscious bias training for anyone who is account director level or above. This training is designed to give people awareness of any unconscious bias, for example that time worked is equal to productivity, so that it can be corrected when it occurs and we can make better decisions.
5. Female Leadership Programmes: In 2015, WPP launched Stella, a senior leadership and networking group in the UK that aims to help develop and accelerate the careers of our current and future female leaders, tackle barriers to progression and spread best practice. In 2017 WPP began rolling out Walk the Talk, an intensive coaching programme to empower female senior leaders and stand-out talent to take the steps they need to thrive in their careers. WPP also runs X Factor - a mentoring and development programme for WPP’s senior women led by Charlotte Beers, the former global CEO of Ogilvy & Mather, chairman of J. Walter Thompson and US Under Secretary of State and Mindshare has partnered with Charlotte Beers to launch a similar initiative called Community X that has similar aims and crosses the client / agency relationship.

We are confident that these initiatives will help address the gender pay gap issue.