Summary:
- In Great Britain, women hold on average 21% less total wealth than men, with the pension gap (43%) responsible for almost the entire difference, according to Women’s Budget Group analysis of ONS data published in July 2025
- The gap barely exists in women’s twenties but grows to 23% by their sixties, driven by the motherhood penalty, career breaks, lower investment participation, and a pension system that penalises part-time and low-income workers
- Families can narrow their own version of the gap by auditing individual (not just household) pension and investment positions, treating career breaks as a shared financial decision with a known cost, and starting to invest even in small amounts, early
What is the gender wealth gap?
Most people have heard of the gender pay gap. Fewer talk about the gender wealth gap, which is a different and larger problem.
The pay gap measures the difference in what men and women earn. The wealth gap measures the difference in everything they own: savings, property, investments, and private pensions.
In Great Britain, women hold on average 21% less total wealth than men. In raw numbers, that’s a mean gap of around £78,000 per person (men: £378,079; women: £300,017), according to analysis of the ONS Wealth and Assets Survey by the Women’s Budget Group, published in July 2025.
One thing the data makes clear: the gap has nothing to do with property. Women actually hold slightly more property wealth on average than men, most likely because of joint homeownership. It’s everything else that’s lopsided.
And one factor dominates above all others: pensions.
The pension gap is where the real damage happens
Women’s mean pension wealth is 43% lower than men’s. In median terms, the gap is even starker. Women aged 55-59 have a median private pension pot of £81,000 versus men’s £156,000. That’s a 48% gap, according to the Department for Work and Pensions, July 2025.
The practical result? Women approaching retirement face an implied income difference of around £5,000 per year. If you want to understand how private pensions work in the UK and why the contribution gap compounds so significantly over time, our guide to UK personal pensions is a useful starting point.
Around 2 million women in the UK say they don’t believe they’ll ever be able to retire, according to a Scottish Widows and YouGov survey of over 5,000 UK adults published in 2024. That’s not pessimism. For many, it’s arithmetic.
How does the gap open up?
The gap barely exists in your twenties. Women aged 20-29 have nearly identical wealth to men their age. Then life happens.
The pay gap bites in your thirties
The full-time gender pay gap is 6.9% (provisional), according to the ONS Gender Pay Gap in the UK: 2025 bulletin, published in October 2025. Modest on the surface. But that figure hides what’s really going on.
For workers aged 22-29, the pay gap is just 0.9%. By 40-49, it’s 9.1%. By 50-59, it’s 12.5%. That widening isn’t random. The ONS itself notes it “may be a result of the impact of motherhood.”
The motherhood penalty
Five years after the birth of a first child, a mother’s monthly earnings are on average 42% lower than they were before. That’s £1,051 less per month, and a total earnings loss of £65,618 over those five years, according to ONS analysis of HMRC PAYE data linked to birth registrations, published in October 2025.
The long-run picture is harder still. Research by the Institute for Fiscal Studies found that 20 years after the birth of a first child, a mother earns about 33% less per hour than a similarly educated father. The wage never fully recovers.
Career breaks compound the pension damage
Women are 12 times more likely than men to take a career break to raise children (36% vs 3%), according to Scottish Widows’ 2025 Women and Retirement Report. A five-year career break taken at age 35 costs a woman roughly £69,380 in pension savings, based on actuarial modelling in the same report.
Many women aren’t even in the pension system to begin with. 2.5 million women in employment (17% of all working women) don’t qualify for auto-enrolment because they earn below the £10,000 annual threshold. 79% of all workers below that threshold are women, according to the NOW:Pensions and Pensions Policy Institute Gender Pensions Gap Report 2024. They’re not saving at all, through no fault of their own.
The investment gap
43% of men in the UK hold investments outside of pensions. Only 28% of women do, according to the FCA’s Financial Lives 2024 survey, published in May 2025. Among young people aged 18-34, that gap widens to 41% of men versus just 20% of women.
This matters because investment returns compound. The less a woman invests in her thirties and forties, the further behind she falls by retirement. If you’re thinking about where to start, our guide to investment options for retirement in the UK covers the main options without the jargon.
Some of this comes down to confidence. Only 18% of women in the UK have “very good” financial literacy, compared to 41% of men, according to research by Aberdeen Group and Opinium published in March 2026. 54% of women feel confident understanding financial products, versus 72% of men, according to Raisin UK’s Closing the Confidence Savings Gap report, published in July 2026. In an HL study of 7,500 women investors cited by the FCA, 63% found investment terminology off-putting.
These are not personal failings. They’re predictable outcomes of a financial system that has, for decades, worked better for men than for women.
The compounding effect across a lifetime
Put this all together and you can see why the gender wealth gap grows with age:
- Ages 20-29: practically zero
- Ages 30-39: 12%
- Ages 40-49: 20%
- Ages 60-69: 23% (peak)
By retirement, many women have had decades of lower earnings, interrupted pension contributions, lower investment participation, and less financial confidence. They’re also statistically more likely to be single in later life, because women live longer. There is no partner’s pension to supplement their own.
Women make up 67% of pensioners living in poverty. 50% of all pensioners in poverty are single women, according to the NOW:Pensions and Pensions Policy Institute Gender Pensions Gap Report 2024.
What can families do?
The gender wealth gap is a structural problem. No single household can fix the system. But there are concrete choices that change the trajectory.
Look at individual wealth, not just household wealth
One of the most damaging myths in family finance is “we’re fine because we have a joint mortgage.” Individual wealth matters, because life is unpredictable. Divorce, bereavement, redundancy: in any of those situations, individual financial standing counts.
Sit down together and look at each person’s pension, savings, and investments separately. Not just the household total. If you’ve never had that kind of conversation as a couple, our guide to managing joint accounts and guide to mastering tough family financial conversations are good places to start. Most couples are surprised by what they find when they actually look.
Check the pension gap inside your own household
If there’s a gap between partners’ pension pots, ask whether it was a conscious choice. If one partner stepped back from work to raise children, have the other partner’s pension contributions been adjusted to compensate? For many couples, that conversation has never happened.
Also check whether anyone in the household earns under £10,000 from a single employer. If so, they may not be auto-enrolled. You can ask the employer to enrol them voluntarily, and legally the employer must do so.
Treat any career break as a shared financial decision
If one partner is considering stepping back from work to care for children or elderly relatives, the pension cost of that decision should be part of the conversation before it happens. That £69,380 figure is knowable in advance. With it on the table, you can plan: higher contributions before the break, continued contributions during it, or a larger offset from the partner who keeps working. It’s also worth thinking through other financial risks that a career break can create. Our guide to preparing financially for unexpected life events covers income protection and critical illness cover, both of which become more important when one partner is out of employment. Most families that have done the numbers choose differently to those that haven’t.
Start investing, even in small amounts
The confidence gap between men and women around investing is real. But so is the cost of not investing. Cash sitting in savings loses value to inflation over time. Markets have historically grown over long periods. You don’t need to become an investment expert. A regular monthly contribution to a Stocks and Shares ISA, started early, adds up meaningfully over 20 or 30 years.
The goal isn’t to catch up overnight. It’s to make sure one person in the household isn’t sitting entirely on the sidelines.
Awareness is where it starts
Women in the UK retire with significantly less money than men. The causes are structural: a pay gap that opens up in women’s thirties, a caregiving burden that still falls mostly on women, an investment culture that has been slow to welcome them, and a pension system that penalises part-time and low-income workers.
None of this is inevitable at the household level. The families that close their own version of this gap aren’t the ones with the highest incomes. They’re the ones that looked at their individual financial positions honestly, had the difficult conversations early, and made deliberate choices rather than drifting into the default.
If you haven’t had that conversation yet, there’s no better time to start than now.
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