Macmillan pay gap closes as men's bonuses rise

The median gender pay gap at Macmillan Publishing International Limited has closed slightly to 28% in favour of women while the difference in bonus payments for men has risen, according to its new report.

Although 63% of those workers who earned a bonus were women, men still took home bonuses 70% higher on average in 2018, because its three most senior leaders were all men. That is an increase on the 57% reported in last year's report, which the company attributed to an “exceptional one-off bonus”, which was paid in the distribution division where the majority of the team is made up of men. The bonus earnings median for women and men for 2018 was exactly the same.

The organisation, made up of Pan Macmillan, Priddy Books and Macmillan Distribution (MDL), employs 641 staff across its sites in Swansea, Basingstoke and London.

On average, women earned slightly more than men, with a 5% difference compared to only 2% last year. The median gap was 28% - a fall from 34% in 2017.

In all but the lowest pay quartile, dominated by the distribution side of the business, there was a higher proportion of women than men. In the highest pay bracket, women dominated by 66% while the quartile below was even higher, at 76%.

Hachette UK has previously called for firms to disclose figures with and without their distribution arms included so publishers can be compared like-for-like, but Macmillan told The Bookseller this was not possible.

The gender report, released on 28th March, a week before the official deadline, refers to full-time employees as they stood on 5th April 2018. The median average refers to the mid-point of all employees' salaries from lowest to highest paid, while the mean is calculated by dividing the total wages of a company by its staff numbers.

The report stated: “Some one-off bonus payments affected the data we submitted last year. Our quartiles and mean/median hourly pay have largely stayed the same; the hourly mean gap has increased slightly for females within our business. Our bonus pay gap has increased slightly, largely down to the fact that the three most senior leaders within the business are currently all male.”

In the report, signed off by Lara Borlenghi, finance director for Pan Macmillan, and Simon Cramond, SVP Finance at Macmillan Publishing International, it said the results showed pay was “broadly balanced” between genders.

It stated: “We are confident that men and women are being paid fairly. We are pleased to have flexible, family friendly policies, and have recently introduced enhanced maternity and paternity policies and shared parental leave.

“We at MPIL are committed to our inclusive culture. We value the diversity of our workforce and when it comes to pay we make compensation decisions based on skill, experience and job related criteria. We carry out regular formal benchmarking against both internal and external measures.

“We want to improve our inclusive culture by continuing to monitor our gender pay gap and taking a gender balanced approach to development, progression and succession planning.”

All employers with more than 250 staff are required by law to report their gender pay gaps by 4th April, with a number of publishers and retailers in the book industry yet to do so. So far, Pearson, the British Library, Hachette, Springer Nature, Wiley, Elsevier and W H Smith have all disclosed theirs.