Quick test: name a female boss at a large print business.
Nope, me neither. In fact, you have to get down to number 24 in PrintWeek’s Top 500, and CPI Group, where the business is run by two talented women: Alison Kaye and Tanya Dunbar.
There are other notable examples of women in the upper echelons of large industry players: Walstead Group has two women on its main board: CFO Zoe Repman and group commercial director Debbie Read. And APS Group executive director Kim Naylor has spent her whole career in the industry.
At Moo, a company that can be considered young and funky by general industry standards, four out of 12 members of the firm’s leadership team are women, yet Moo’s gender pay gap figures are 23.2% and 28.9% lower for women for the mean and median pay rates respectively.
It’s noteworthy that alongside its filing Moo has taken the opportunity to file an ‘employer’s gender pay gap report’. This frank and fulsome report includes a breakdown of the stats across all its employees globally, and CEO Richard Moross has also outlined Moo’s action plan to close its gender pay gap. It’s worth a read and you can find it here.
The employer’s report at least gives companies an opportunity to add some context of their own, as Linneys has done, too, in its statement.
If I were a young, talented person in the process of considering what makes an employer of choice, I would be poring over this stuff with great interest.
What’s odd is that some businesses have not chosen to file any commentary at all, which seems like a missed opportunity especially when the accompanying bald numbers look bad. Or, indeed, awful.
It’s no surprise that in a traditionally male-dominated industry print’s gender pay gap figures overall are pretty rubbish, with just a handful of notable exceptions in our table. And I do realise that the reporting requirements are something of a blunt instrument.
Nevertheless, the inaugural stats are informative and in many cases unacceptable and should give the chaps that dominate the majority of our industry’s boardrooms cause for concern.
