Gender Pay Gap – reported figures for Independent Vetcare Limited

Statement from Chief Executive Officer

At IVC Evidensia, we believe all members of our team should be fairly rewarded for their work and have equal access to opportunities.

Women make up the backbone of our workforce, much like in the broader veterinary field. Bridging the gender pay gap needs sustained attention, and requires continued cultural changes that are under way across our business and our industry. As Europe’s largest veterinary group, we recognise the positive impact we can and should have.

We have implemented policies in the UK, including clearly defined, role-based pay bands for our practice roles, to help guarantee equitable hiring and payroll decisions, as well as clear career and salary development pathways for our people. We are also making significant progress in encouraging more women into senior roles, including on the Executive Committee of our Group, and you can see more outlined in the report below.

We remain committed to continuing to close the gender pay gap.

Simon Smith, April 2024
 
All data as at snapshot date of 5 April each year

 

PROPORTION OF MALES AND FEMALES RECEIVING A BONUS

 

PROPORTION OF MALES & FEMALES BY PAY QUARTER

 

The data in the table above applies to all roles across the entire UK business, with the distribution of men and women disproportionately affecting the analysis. As we have such a low proportion of men in the lower two pay quartiles, the male median will aways be higher than the female median. On the whole, far more women than men are employed in lower paid roles, not just in IVC Evidensia but across the entire veterinary sector, and this is particularly true in the practice teams which make up the vast majority of our roles. We’re pleased to see that the proportion of women in the top pay quartile of our business has risen slightly for the second year in a row.

Within each quartile and job type, we are confident that our reward structure is based on objective and relevant factors and that rates of pay for specific roles are in line with market norms. We have evolved our pay and reward significantly since 2021 to ensure common standards of pay across the estate and competitive rates of pay compared to the market, and that pay decision-makers have clear parameters for determining pay levels for individuals.

Achievements and initiatives since our last report:

• We set a goal to have women in half of all senior roles* by 2025 and are pleased to have achieved this during 2023. Our focus now is on further work to ensure our culture supports our women employees at all levels of the business, and to create a pipeline of women talent for senior roles.
• Our Artemis International Leaders Programme is core to our aim to support the development of more women leaders. While we welcome both men and women to the programme, nominations reflect the demographics of our company; therefore, the majority of participants are women. More than 20% of participants from our first cohort have moved to a new leadership role within IVC Evidensia and we have recently finished the second cohort.
• We ensure that Group-level committees all have female representation, and our recruitment policy for senior roles is to have at least one woman among the final candidates. The three most recent joiners on our Group Executive Committee are female.
• We launched a flexible working toolkit in the UK, with around 90% of our roles advertised as exclusively or optionally part-time, and two-thirds of our UK clinics have at least 20% of their vets working part-time.