Women are waiting 100 years to wait for the end of the gender pay gap

Women face a 100-year wait to close the gender pay gap if wage progress continues to lie at the current rate, new research shows.

Despite extensive efforts to improve gender equality at work, almost half of companies in the UK reported increasing their gender pay gap in the last year, A PwC analysis showed that women in the UK, on ​​average, still earn 87 p for every £ 1 earned by men.

British companies have become so desperate in recent years to change the composition of their meeting rooms, urging bounty hunters to shortlist only women, but little has changed in terms of reporting gender pay gaps. Since the records began five years ago, the average pay gap between the sexes has narrowed by just 0.5 percent, PwC said.

Katy Bennett, director of diversity at PwC UK, said: “If the current level of progress continues – it has so far fallen by 0.5 per cent in five years – the gender pay gap in the UK will not disappear by 2151 .

“A century – another five generations of women – is too long to wait.”

Ministers told FTSE 350 earlier this year that by the end of 2025, they will have to have at least one woman in the role of president, CEO, CFO or senior independent director.

Companies with more than 250 employees must report the gender pay gap as part of the government’s goal to close the gender pay gap.

The PwC warning came after the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) said in December that almost no progress had been made in reducing British pay gap between the sexes over the past 25 years, given the jumps in women’s education.

IFS said progress could be made through government intervention, arguing that even expensive policies such as free childcare would pay for themselves.

The wage gap between men and women for the amount earned per hour narrowed from 24 percent in 1995 to 19 percent, the Economic Brain Center said in December.

On Friday, it also turned out that men’s retirement pensions are worth more than twice as much as women’s.

Legal & General examined the pension funds of more than 50,000 Britons who retired in 2021. The average amount saved by women was £ 12,000, while the equivalent of a male pensioner at the same age was more than twice as much as £ 26,000. .