Fairer Pensions · By Priya Raichand, Senior Policy Adviser · Published 2 April 2026
The gender pensions gap is one of the most stubborn facts in UK retirement saving. Women arrive at retirement with markedly smaller pots than men doing comparable work over comparable lifetimes. It is well documented, widely deplored, and barely moving. The reason it barely moves is that most of the debate treats it as a pensions problem, when it is really a working-life problem that pensions faithfully record.
The pension system is the messenger, not the cause
A defined contribution pension is, at heart, an arithmetic machine. It takes a percentage of what you earn, for as long as you earn it, and invests the result. It does not know or care about your gender. What it does do is compound every interruption, every part-time year and every pound of lower pay into a permanent difference at 67.
So when we look at the data across millions of savers, the gap we see is an honest reflection of three things happening in the labour market:
- Time out of work. Career breaks for childcare and, increasingly, for elder care fall disproportionately on women. Contributions stop; compounding does not resume where it left off.
- Part-time and lower-paid work. Returning part-time protects the job but shrinks the contribution base for years, sometimes permanently.
- The auto-enrolment earnings trigger. Workers earning below the threshold are not enrolled at all. A large share of those workers are women, and many hold multiple jobs, each individually below the line.
Why the multiple-jobs problem matters more than it sounds
Someone working three part-time roles might earn well above the auto-enrolment trigger in total, yet be enrolled in none of them because each employer assesses their own payroll in isolation. This is not an edge case. It is a structural blind spot that systematically excludes exactly the people who most need workplace saving, and it is entirely fixable with policy.
What would genuinely move the dial
We are evidence-led about this, and the evidence points at a small number of unglamorous changes rather than a single grand gesture:
- Remove or lower the earnings trigger, and assess eligibility across a person's total earnings rather than per employer.
- Contribute from the first pound of earnings, rather than only on qualifying earnings above a lower limit. This benefits every low-to-middle earner and disproportionately helps women.
- Make family leave pension-protected so that contributions continue through statutory leave, funded in a way that does not penalise smaller employers.
- Normalise pension conversations at the point of return to work, when hours, pay and pension are all being renegotiated at once and almost nobody mentions the third one.
- Publish the data. Providers and large employers should report their own gender pensions gap the way they report the pay gap. What gets measured gets managed.
What we are doing about it
As a not-for-profit provider we have no commercial reason to be quiet about this. We publish research on the gap, we design our member communications in plain English so that people who were never taught about pensions are not shut out of the conversation, and we press government and industry for the changes above. We also keep our own house in order: simple charges, a rebate that returns money to members, and tools that let people see the effect of a contribution increase before they commit to it.
The honest position
We cannot close the gender pensions gap on our own, and neither can any provider. What we can do is stop pretending it is caused by women making poor choices, name the structural causes accurately, and support the reforms that would actually work. The gap took decades of working life to create. It will take deliberate policy, not encouragement, to close it.