Sodexo UK has become the first company in the hospitality sector to voluntarily publish its ethnicity pay gap.
The company’s 2020 pay gap report for the first time includes the relative pay of people in different ethnic groups and shows a mean ethnicity pay gap of 5%.
The data is based on the 75% of Sodexo’s workforce who have shared their ethnicity information. The mean ethnicity pay gap is the difference between the average hourly earnings of employees in different ethnic groups versus the benchmark for white employees.
In the report, Sodexo has broken down pay gap data into three different ethnic groups: Black, Asian and Mixed Ethnic backgrounds, in recognition that the combined pay data for these groups may hide disparities between them. It shows the greatest pay gap is for Asian employees at 7% followed by black employees (5%) and those employees from mixed ethnic backgrounds (2%).
The annual publication of gender pay gap and bonus gap data is required for businesses employing more than 250 people, however there is no current legal requirement to publish information around ethnicity pay gaps despite calls from campaigners for greater transparency.
Sodexo has pledged to establish targets to increase ethnicity representation in senior leadership positions as part of a wider action plan for the UK & Ireland which also pledges to reduce the gender pay gap.
“We feel strongly that the first steps towards achieving our diversity and inclusion goals are transparency and holding ourselves publicly accountable,” said Sean Haley, region chair for Sodexo UK & Ireland.
“There is a lot of work to do to improve parity in both gender and ethnicity, but only with this level of clarity and the impetus to have more open conversations, can we put measures in place to move our organisation in the right direction and to do better by our colleagues and the communities in which we operate,” Haley added.
This week also saw the launch of a new report on representation within the sector by the not-for-profit group Be Inclusive Hospitality. In a survey of 387 hospitality professionals at all levels, from different ethnicities and occupations, it found more than half of all ethnic minorities have experienced or witnessed racism within the workplace.
Of those hospitality professionals surveyed, 42% of those from mixed ethnic groups felt their race/ethnicity had hindered their career progression, while 56% of Asian professionals and 41% of black hospitality professionals felt the same. Just 7% of white hospitality professionals felt their race/ethnicity had hindered their career progression.
