Gender Pay Gap Report 2024
This report outlines our performance on Gender Pay for our colleagues as of April 2023 and our continuing areas of focus to ensure improvements in the balance of men and women within the company.
Introduction
At Dexters we pride ourselves on the way we treat our colleagues. We start from the principle that we want people to spend their careers with us, and work relentlessly to keep this promise. We invest many times higher than the industry average in coaching and developing our talented team through our extensive Dexters Academy programmes and as a result over 90% of our managers have been promoted from within, something of which we’re incredibly proud. We also strive to create a workplace that is vibrant, fun and fulfilling and that is equal, diverse and inclusive. We recruit from a pool of talent across London and succeed due to our local teams who are passionate about consistently delivering excellent customer service.
We regularly monitor pay externally as well as reviewing pay at all levels internally to ensure it is equal and non-discriminatory for the same or similar roles.
Salary bands and grades are the same for men and women in administration and support roles. A large proportion of our roles are fee earning and have variable pay made up of base pay, commission or bonus payments. The principles are transparent and gender neutral and therefore any difference in the variable component of pay is primarily attributable to the difference in sales performance between individuals.
As part of our annual review of salaries we have reviewed all job categories for anomalies for roles of the same level and job content and adjusted these if applicable.
Gender Pay Gap and our results
We are pleased to share that 50% of our roles are held by women, and in three out of the four pay quartiles we employ near equal or more women than men.
We continue with our positive action strategy to pipeline more women at entry level as this is an acknowledged approach to help feed through more women to senior level positions, and through our efforts over the last five years, we have seen an impressive change from 22% of our director roles held by women to over 31% by 2023.
Our mean gender pay gap of 24.8% is driven by structural matters rather than inequality in pay, however has seen a positive change from 31.8% in 2021. Our median gender pay gap is 17.7% in 2023, down from 19.1% in 2022 and 27.9% in 2021.
In the lower quartile we have a higher proportion of women in administration roles with fixed working arrangements and salaries, and at the more senior level we have more men in senior fee earning roles at board director and MD level. We are taking positive action to address this imbalance however our principle remains that we only promote the best person for the job.
We are pleased to report that looking at average pay in four quartiles, in three out of the four quartiles there is no or minimal pay gap.
In addition, our investment in recruiting, promoting and retaining women colleagues over the past three to four years has resulted in a change in the number of women colleagues in the upper quartile and a positive shift in the upper quartile mean pay gap from 22.1% in April 2017 to 11.9% in April 2023.
What we are doing to continue our progress
Since our first office in Twickenham in 1993 we have never discriminated. We have always held the view it’s important to have diverse and inclusive teams in our offices and we strive to have a different range of experience.
We’re doing the following to address this and meet our objective to have more women in senior board level fee earning positions:
• Identifying key people and implementing a fast-track programme to management with tailored development plans
• Mentoring for all management roles - we have over 350 colleagues meeting with their mentor
• A dedicated group focused on female management development including mentoring for up-and-coming women who are our directors and MD’s of the future
• A continuing commitment to flexible working and job share roles wherever possible and particularly at sales and lettings board level
• A flexible return to work policy following maternity and paternity leave
• We have changed and enhanced our maternity and paternity pay policy to support working parents
• We offer attractive return to work options and support, further encouragement for experienced female colleagues to continue their careers with us
While we will always employ the best person for the job, however by continuing to focus on employing a higher proportion of female colleagues and investing in their career progression we continue to see more women at senior leadership levels.
Andy Shepherd FRICS CEO