CRH’s average Irish group services gender pay gap at 59%

CRH Group Services employs 364 people in Ireland, 45 per cent of whom are women

CRH has a public target to have women making up at least a third of the group’s senior leaders by 2030, up from 22 per cent last year.
CRH has a public target to have women making up at least a third of the group’s senior leaders by 2030, up from 22 per cent last year.

CRH’s average hourly pay gap between men and women in its Irish group services unit stands at 59 per cent, while men in that area also receive bonuses that are, on average, 72 per cent higher.

That’s according to a gender pay gap report published on Monday by one of the building materials giant’s three Irish subsidiaries, in line with new reporting requirements falling on Irish employers with more than 250 employees.

CRH Group Services employs 364 people in Ireland, 45 per cent of whom are women. While it is more gender balanced than CRH’s Roadstone and Irish Cement divisions in the Republic in terms of employment, the fact that senior management is dominated by men is driving the pay and bonus wedge. Most of the women in the unit are employed in roles across areas such as finance, human resources, procurement, legal and compliance, and executive assistants.

While 84 per cent of Roadstone’s 666 employees and 86 per cent of Irish Cement’s are men, the average salary gap is just 7 per cent in each of these subsidiaries. The bonus gap is 16 per cent in Roadstone and 2 per cent in Irish Cement.

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Taken together, the three subsidiaries’ average salary gap is 12 per cent and the average bonus gap is 25 per cent.

CRH, led by chief executive Albert Manifold, said that the gender pay gap between men and women who have been working in its group services unit in Ireland for less than five years is 0.5 per cent, slightly in favour of women.

“We recognise that significant focus is required to address the gender imbalances represented by the gender pay gap and we’re fully committed to making progress – building an inclusive and diverse organisation in which talented people of all backgrounds are welcome and can work in an environment which supports them to perform at their best,” it said.

CRH has a public target to have women making up at least a third of the group’s senior leaders by 2030, up from 22 per cent last year.

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A Sunday Independent analysis of a selection of 20 gender-gap reports issued in recent weeks by employers, including Meta, Amazon, Flutter, Intel, and Dairygold, found that the average pay gap was 12 per cent. This is slightly higher than the 11.3 per cent Eurostat estimate for Ireland for 2019.

The average bonus gap across the 20 employers was 20.5 per cent, ranging from 13.7 per cent in favour of women to 50.6 per cent in favour of men, the newspaper said.

Joe Brennan

Joe Brennan

Joe Brennan is Markets Correspondent of The Irish Times