PDSA Gender Pay Gap

We are committed to promoting equality of opportunity in employment and selecting employees on merit, irrespective of race, ethnic origin, colour, nationality, sex, age, relationship status, religion/belief or sexual orientation.

We are passionate about having understandable, equitable and transparent reward policies that enable us to achieve our mission and reflect our culture, and we are committed to reducing our gender pay gap.

Under legislation introduced in April 2017, UK employers with more than 250 employees are required to publish their gender pay gap. The gender pay gap reflects the average hourly earnings pay for men and women undertaking the same or similar jobs.

We have a robust benchmarking and job evaluation process that ensures we are paying our employees fairly, irrelevant of gender. We continually review our pay and benefits with extensive benchmarking and market research.

PDSA employees are predominantly female, which is representative of animal welfare charities.

2024 Analysis

Our analysis shows the following results, calculated in line with mandatory requirements:

The overall difference between men’s and women’s earnings is 27% (mean) or 30% (median) based on hourly rates of pay at the snapshot date of 2023. Research suggests that fewer men in the lower pay quartiles drive the gender pay gap.

This is a slight increase of 4.2% in our mean gender pay gap and 0.3% in our median gender pay gap driven by an increase in males in the Upper pay quartile. Although we have slightly increased, this is still below our 2021 figures.

We are continually reviewing our recruitment processes, language and imagery used to ensure that there is no bias, which may be unconsciously attracting more women for the advertised vacancies across all quartiles.

Pay quartiles

The reporting process requires us to split our workforce into four equal quarters and report the proportion of males and females in each of these segments:

PDSA employs a large percentage of females – 87% of the total people employed. The table above shows that when we compare the pay at each of the quartiles, the average pay for males and females is more aligned and our pay gaps close. It is lower than the national average of 14.3% across all the quartiles, and in fact, within the lower quartile, females are paid more than males. Our overall 27% pay gap is driven by the fact that the distribution of males within the organisation is unbalanced, with only 18% of males working within the lower and lower middle quartiles – this drives up our mean pay for males. Conversely, we have a strong representation of females at every level of the organisation, which results in a more balanced but lower mean pay for females.

We continue to promote where possible, a healthy work-life balance with the introduction of flexible hours, hybrid and remote working and holiday trading.

We have an enhanced maternity and paternity package.

Bonus payments

No bonus payments were made during the reporting period.

Our Commitment

We are confident that men and women are paid equally for doing equivalent jobs across our organisation as we have a clear and robust job evaluation system that focuses on the job not the jobholder.

We remain committed to addressing our gender pay gap by continuing to:

• Review our recruitment methods and training, to ensure no unconscious bias is being applied to roles within the lower quartiles.
• Focus on areas in the organisation where the gender pay gap is highest.
• Understand our gender pay gap in the wider context of the sectors from which we recruit.

I confirm that PDSA’s gender pay gap calculations are accurate and meet the requirements of the Regulations.

Jan McLoughlin | Director General