For the second year, Superdrug – part of the A.S. Watson Group – published joint gender pay gap data with UK discount chain Savers, which is also owned by the group.

As of April 2018, the mean pay gap – the difference in pay between the average male and female UK hourly rate – was 22% in favour of male employees, down from 26% the previous year.

Superdrug attributed the mean difference to having “more women in lower paid roles than men, for instance working as sales advisors in stores”.

Its median pay gap – which takes the mid-point when all hourly rates are lined up from biggest to smallest, reducing the impact of one-off outliers – has stayed the same, reported as 16% for both 2017 and 2018.

The multiple holds “regular events” to help women develop their careers via its gender equality network it said.

Day Lewis closes its median pay gap

Male Day Lewis employees received on average 18% more than female staff in 2018, the chain said, down from 22% the previous year.

Day Lewis managed to close its median gender pay gap in the year up to April 2018, after reporting a 5% median pay gap the previous year.

The chain employs more than 2,500 people across more than 300 pharmacies, including around 330 pharmacists, it said.

Day Lewis’s Rupa Patel said: “As a female executive director, I am proud to champion equality and diversity in our business.”

Paydens largely unchanged

Paydens’ mean pay gap remained around 20% in April 2018 and 2017, it said in its gender pay gap report published in February (see table).

The chain’s median pay gap has narrowed by three percentage points, down to 1% compared with 4% the previous year.

Its workforce “is made up of significantly more female than male staff”, and the only pay band with a “significant difference” is the highest paid, Paydens said.

This is because the group “has a very wide range of roles, from dispensary assistants to pharmacist managers to the executive management team”, it explained.

“We are confident that men and women are paid equally for doing equivalent jobs across our organisation and that the pay gap is related to people carrying out different roles,” Paydens said.

The other pharmacy chains

The gender pay gaps at Lloydspharmacy, Cohens and Rowlands has widened, according to their second annual gender pay gap reports, with Cohens reporting a 22 percentage point increase in its average pay gap.

Last week, C+D reported that the average gender pay gap at Boots had slightly narrowed from 21% in 2017 to 20% a year later, while Well’s gender pay gap remained around 20%.

As of 2018, companies with over 250 employees are legally required to publish annual reports on the difference in the average hourly wage of all men and women across their workforce. This is not the same as equal pay, which is the legal requirement that men and women in the same employment, performing equal work, must receive the same wages.

See this table for all the pharmacy chains’ gender pay gap figures, correct to one decimal place.