In 2021 Gousto saw another year of tremendous growth, but also experienced a confluence of industry wide challenges, greater than the year previous. Despite this, in the past twelve months we doubled our workforce, opened our third fulfilment centre in Cheshire and now deliver 8 million meals to UK households every month. 

Last year, we shared our ongoing commitment to stay focused on building a culture of inclusivity amid our growth. Since then, we’re proud to have become a B Corporation and certified Real Living Wage employer, demonstrating our commitment to growing responsibly.

Whilst we’re proud to have made considerable improvements for a fourth consecutive year to close our gender pay gap, we recognise this is the start of a long and important journey. We’re now focused on how we can continue to make improvements regardless of the continued headwind of industry challenges.

What is the gender pay gap?

This is the average difference between pay for men and women, regardless of their roles and seniority. It is different to equal pay, which ensures men and women employed in the same roles receive equal remuneration.

What does this mean at Gousto?

Gousto’s 2021 median pay gap was 4.9%, which is 52% less than it was in 2020 and 79% less than it was in 2019. We’re still working towards getting that down to zero, but we’re making significant progress.

We are on our way to achieving our mission of becoming the UK’s most-loved way to eat dinner and there are certain privileges that business growth allows us, such as better rewarding employees for their contributions, helping them to develop their skills, and bringing in amazing new talent to the team.

However, as a UK-leading technology business,  we remain extremely conscious of the significant inequality in our industry. We are still seeing more men than women studying technology subjects at higher education, leading to women making up just 26% of the overall tech labour market, which are the positions typically attracting higher salaries.

What have we done to promote inclusivity and improve our Gender Pay Gap?

• Grew our female share of management by 15%, with the Board now at 45%, significantly above the 37% of FTSE 350 board positions that are held by women as of February 2022.
• Championed and supported women, by – for example – signing up to Jo’s Cervical Cancer trust pledge “Time to Test’, and ensuring time is given to our female staff to access cervical screening and vital health appointments.
• Piloted a diversity-focused reverse mentoring scheme; connecting senior leaders with junior team members to better understand inclusion issues. 88% of participants agreed that the scheme increased their awareness of ID&B issues.
• Encouraged inclusive conversations across the business by hosting a talk with Maggie Alphonsi MBE, as well as a Women in Leadership panel hosted by Anna Whitehouse. We also opened a virtual wall where colleagues were encouraged to share their experiences throughout March to coincide with International Women’s Day.
• Established our Technology ID&B Female Leaders employee group, to offer an open network for our colleagues to support, champion and inspire progression of women within the Tech industry and beyond.
• Introduced our ‘Work Where it Works’ and ‘Flexi Time’ policies in line with employee feedback, to support our workforce in pursuing their careers

What’s next?

To achieve an inclusive culture, we need to balance gender representation across all our roles, and dismantle systemic diversity issues in the workplace. Currently this means integrating ID&B across our entire ecosystem. Our key focuses this year are:

• Learning from our community and networks, both within the business and externally, to build a two-way conversation and steer our wider Inclusion, Diversity and Belonging strategy.
• Optimising our flexible working policies post pandemic, based on feedback from our teams, to ensure we maintain a supportive and family friendly environment.
• Refining our hiring processes by removing gender-biased language from job specifications, diversifying our hiring panels and ensuring all hiring managers receive regular inclusion training.
• Consulting our workforce on the introduction of female-centric policies around menopause, fertility and pregancy loss.
• Amplifying our internal inclusion training and continuing to celebrate women’s awareness days in our inclusion calendar.

This is day one and a lot of work lies ahead to make Gousto the most inclusive tech Unicorn business. At all levels, it’s our mission at Gousto to make real, continuous progress to reduce our gender pay gap – and we call on the entire tech industry to do the same.

Whilst we wholeheartedly encourage gender pay gap reporting, not everyone identifies as their legal gender status. We support our non-binary colleagues and customers and hope that with continued positive change there will be more inclusive representation for all groups.

Gender pay gap

Gender bonus gap

Proportion of employees receiving 2021 bonus

Pay quartiles (proportion of males and females in each pay quartile)

1. https://technation.io/diversity-and-inclusion-in-uk-tech/#key-statistics
2.  Ftsewomenleaders.com