UK's Gender Pay Gap: Women in Their 50s Face 72 Days of Unpaid Work

The numbers tell a stark story. Women aged 50-59 in the UK face a gender pay gap of 19.7% — nearly triple the national average of 6.9%. Put another way, women in their fifties effectively work without pay from the start of January until mid-March each year.

Speaking ahead of International Women's Day, Baroness Karren Brady described this reality with characteristic bluntness. At 56, she pointed out that women her age 'work the equivalent of 72 days a year for free'. The West Ham FC vice-chairwoman wasn't mincing words: the systems that govern British workplaces, she argued, still penalise women for shouldering care responsibilities whilst rewarding uninterrupted career progression.

The figures, drawn from Office for National Statistics data for April 2024, reveal median hourly earnings of £18.87 for women compared to £20.27 for men. Uncomfortable as they are, these numbers mask the deeper problem. The 6.9% national gap represents an average that obscures dramatic age-based variation — and therein lies the real story.

Enjoying this article?

Get stories like this in your inbox every week.

Join the Community

The motherhood penalty compounds across decades

Why does the pay gap nearly triple for women in their fifties? The answer lies in accumulated career interruptions and compromised progression. Women now aged 50-59 entered the workforce during the 1980s and early 1990s, an era of minimal maturity support and rigid workplace cultures. Those who took time out for childcare or reduced their hours to manage family responsibilities found themselves shunted onto slower career tracks.

A year out of the workforce in one's thirties doesn't just mean lost earnings for 12 months. It means missing promotions, losing ground on pay progression, and watching colleagues advance whilst you're sidelined.

Frances O'Grady, the former TUC general secretary who now sits as Baroness O'Grady in the Lords, framed the issue around support for young families. Current paternity leave — a mere two weeks — doesn't give fathers meaningful opportunity to share care responsibilities. Without genuine options for equal parenting, women remain default caregivers, with all the career consequences that follow.

According to analysis by the TUC, progress on closing the gender pay gap has slowed to a crawl. At current rates of change, it would take 30 years to eliminate the gap entirely. Three decades is a career. For women entering the workforce today, that timeline means retirement before equality.

Seven years of transparency, limited progress

The UK introduced mandatory gender pay gap reporting in 2017, requiring employers with 250 or more staff to publish their figures annually. The policy was meant to shame laggards into action and accelerate closure rates through public scrutiny. Seven years on, the results are mixed at best.

Transparency has indeed forced companies to confront uncomfortable truths about their pay structures. Some have implemented targeted interventions. But publishing data without enforcement mechanisms has proven insufficient to drive meaningful change. Companies can — and do — publish damning statistics year after year without facing consequences beyond reputational risk.

The government's Employment Rights Act now includes provisions requiring employers to publish action plans alongside their pay gap figures. Minister Baroness Liz Lloyd told the Lords that the government is 'putting in stronger protections for pregnant women and new mothers at work' and improving parental leave systems. Whether these measures will prove more effective than previous transparency requirements remains an open question.

What's interesting here is the disconnect between policy intent and practical outcome. Britain has spent years discussing the gender pay gap, implementing reporting requirements, and wringing hands over progress. Yet the structural issues — inadequate parental leave, inflexible working arrangements, and workplace cultures that penalise career breaks — persist largely unchanged.

The pension gap follows the pay gap

Brady highlighted another dimension of this problem: the gender pay gap 'compounds over a lifetime', feeding directly into a gender pension gap. Women earning less throughout their careers contribute less to pensions and accumulate smaller retirement funds. Those who take career breaks for caring responsibilities may have gaps in National Insurance contributions, affecting state pension entitlement.

For women now in their fifties, the retirement security gap is already locked in. Their working years occurred before recent reforms to shared parental leave and flexible working rights.

The question facing policymakers is whether today's young mothers will fare better. Recent improvements to parental leave and flexible working rights represent progress, but they're incremental rather than transformative. O'Grady's call to 'turbocharge progress by boosting support for young families' acknowledges that current measures aren't sufficient to prevent the next generation of women ending up in the same position.

The cohort of women now experiencing a 19.7% pay gap serves as a warning. Their careers began in an era of minimal support for working mothers, and decades later they're paying the price. In previous commentary, Brady has noted there isn't a magic formula to pay equality, acknowledging the long road ahead. Unless today's workplace reforms prove substantially more effective than past efforts, women currently in their twenties and thirties may find themselves facing similar gaps when they reach their fifties. The 30-year timeline to close the gap isn't just a projection — it's a measure of how slowly Britain's workplace culture is actually changing.

More articles by David Adams