Gender Pay Gap Report 2024

Our purpose in SMT is to ‘Foster Communities’ We do this by building strong relationships and connections with our people, partners, clients and society. Our values of Caring, Daring and Sharing help guide policy and people decisions.

Our Diversity and Inclusion strategy is born from our organisational purpose and values, of which our Gender Pay Gap report and action plan is part of. Since our last Gender Pay Gap Report, SMT GB has increased in numbers from 442 to 483 employees. Our reporting includes everyone SMT GB employs in the UK.

In 2023 our mean pay gap has stayed more or less the same, increasing slightly from 9.54% in 2022 to 10.10% However, in 2023 our median gender pay gap was 5.17%, which is a huge drop from the 2022 figure of 17.02%, and is lower than the National average of 7.7%. The median calculation is deemed by many to be more meaningful than the mean as it removes those very high earners and those earning the lowest wage.

Fundamentally what continues to drive our gender pay gap is the number of female employees in our business. Our current gender split is 395 male, 88 women, with varying representation within our pay quartiles.

The construction and engineering industry continues to struggle to attract women, however we continue to look for and follow advice from leading institutions, whose research+ helps guide our Gender Pay Gap Action Plan.

Pay quartiles show the percentage of male and female employees in four equal sized groups based on their hourly pay. This gives an indication of women's representation at different levels of the organisation, and shows that the majority of the gap falls within the Upper Quartile. This is expected due to the low number of women taking up Engineering roles.

When comparing mean (average) bonus pay, women’s mean bonus pay is 33.15% lower than men’s. This is due to having more men in senior or commission based roles.

In 2022 to help with the cost of living crisis, we altered the pension scheme rules to allow employees to reduce their pension contributions whilst keeping the Employer contribution the same. We also introduced a Special Inflation payment of a fixed amount to be paid to our lowest paid employees. This is currently in place until December 2023 at which point it will be reviewed.

As a business we continue to monitor and benchmark our roles against industry peers and the general market, to not only ensure that our pay rates are aligned and competitive, but we remain a great place to work.