Publicis Sapient UK Gender Pay Gap – 2023

A message from Scott Criddle, Group Vice President, UK Country Lead and EMEA Capacity Lead, Publicis Sapient U.K.

At Publicis Sapient, our purpose is to help all our people thrive in the brave pursuit of next. That purpose can only be achieved by teams that represent diverse backgrounds, experiences, disciplines and crafts. Our DEI ambition is to inspire a sense of belonging, where our people can truly thrive, prosper, and drive positive change that leads to innovation and creativity that directly benefits our clients, our people and our organisation.

This ambition is part of our evolved DEI strategy which has a focus on gender equity and has been a collaboration between our community networks, graduate cohorts, listening sessions from multiple stakeholder groups and leadership teams.

While 2023 has been challenging in a context influenced by a variety of internal and external factors, we stay committed to creating extraordinary impact for our people, clients, communities and stakeholders; and have clear objectives and action plans in order to develop an inclusive culture of equity and social justice, so that all our people feel they belong.

The annual Gender Pay Gap Report is a valued opportunity to review the progress we are making against our gender action plans. To ensure accountability, we have revitalized our Gender Equity Plan, and continue to review and introduce interventions such as supporting parents with family friendly policies, new learning opportunities, and initiatives promoting agile work. This also includes reviewing and setting gender representation targets and driving gender balanced and diverse shortlists for interviews.

In 2023, hiring dropped due to business demands, but gender representation improved to 35.4% from 34.2% in 2022 – with nearly 40% of new hires being women. While we aim for more, we are pleased with the progress and committed to addressing systemic equity and inclusion issues, recognizing these require time and effort.

Key Points

• Our gender and bonus median pay gap has improved in a few years, though in 2023 this gap shows an increase from the previous year. This increase in gap is because we have a higher proportion of women in our early career stages and have made significant progress in strengething our pipeline – with 60% of our junior talent being women. This increase of representation in the junior levels does lead to an increase in the mean and median pay gap, which we believe will be overcome when we have a more balanced gender distribution across all career stages. Even at senior levels we are moving in the right direction and have increased our gender representation at Director + and executive levels in the UK. Last year we onboarded senior women leaders into the business and this is an area we want to continue to progress as we know there are fewer women in leadership roles, and this is key to bridging the overall gender pay gap.
  
  
• The increase in the bonus gap is also the result of Publicis Sapient introducing the Sapient Fixed Bonus for Associates and Senior Associates, which is reflected in the change in bonus mean and median due to a higher percentage of women at junior levels compared to senior levels; that reduces the average bonus payout.

• With regards to internal promotions, In 2022-23 we have promoted 24% more women than the previous year and 48% of all promotions between May’22 to April 23 were women, a 7% increase from the previous year.
  
  
  

The Gender Pay Gap Results at a Glance

The gender pay gap is the percentage difference in average pay between men and women across an organisation. This is calculated for all employees regardless of their career stage and whether they are full time or part time.

This is different from equal pay, which is defined as “the right for men and women to be paid the same when doing the same, or equivalent, work” (Equality Act, 2010).

It‘s important to note that a gender pay gap does not mean women are paid less than men for doing the same or equivalent job or work. What it reflects is the mean and median pay gap, which could be due to representation and distribution of men versus women across career stages, especially if there are more men occupying higher paying roles that pay a premium.

Below is a detailed view of both the median and mean average pay, bonus gap and the % of representation by pay quartile bands for Publicis Sapient, all calculated as per Government guidelines.