Closing the Gender Pension Gap Will Take More Than Good Intentions.

Published: 2023  |  Perspective updated: 2025

A couple of years ago I ran an Innovation Forum — one I had designed and led with my team — focused entirely on the gender pension gap. We put out a challenge to fintechs, businesses, social enterprises and charities: if the gap stands at up to 40.5%, what can we actually do about it? How do we innovate to engage women more effectively in their financial futures and improve their retirement outcomes?

The response was energising. People had ideas. People cared. People wanted to work on it together.

What has stayed with me since is not just the enthusiasm in the room, but the scale of what we were up against. Because the gender pension gap is not a problem that a single innovation forum — or a single product, or a single policy — is going to fix. It is structural, it is deep, and at the current rate of progress, it will take a very long time to close.

The numbers are worse than most people realise

When we launched the forum, we cited a gap of up to 40.5%. The picture has not dramatically improved since.

By the government's own measure, the gender pension gap currently stands at 48%, with the average man in his late fifties having a pension pot almost twice the size of a woman at the same age. For today's pensioners, the gap translates to £7,600 a year less income for women in retirement.

The Department for Work and Pensions' own data shows that 57% of pensioners living in poverty are women. Women also live longer on average, which means they need more saved to generate the same annual income — and they are starting from a significantly smaller pot.

At the current rate of progress, modelling suggests it will take around 90 years for the gender pension gap to close completely. That is not a trajectory any of us should find acceptable.

Why the gap exists — and why it is so hard to close

The causes are well documented, which is part of the frustration. We know what is driving this. We are just not fixing it fast enough.

The gender pay gap feeds directly into the pension gap — lower earnings mean lower contributions over a lifetime. Only 59% of women aged 22 to 65 are saving into a private pension, compared to 71% of men, and women are less likely to have other long-term savings to draw on in retirement.

Career breaks for caring responsibilities compound the problem significantly. The career breaks women take to care for their families amount to £39,000 in lost pension savings on average, according to NOW: Pensions' 2024 gender pensions gap report. Women who take a ten-year career gap to shoulder caring responsibilities also risk not qualifying for a full State Pension — which requires 35 qualifying years of contributions.

Auto-enrolment has been one of the more effective interventions of recent decades, but it has not reached everyone equally. Women are more than twice as likely as men to miss out on being automatically enrolled in a workplace pension, with around 100,000 more young female workers than young male workers currently locked out of auto-enrolment due to age and earnings thresholds.

And then there is the confidence and engagement gap. Women are less likely than men to have a plan for their money in retirement — 60% of women compared to 44% of men — and less likely to say they understand enough about pensions to make effective decisions, at 41% of women versus 57% of men. That is not a character flaw. It is the product of decades of financial products and communications designed primarily with men in mind.

What innovation can actually do

Running the Innovation Forum was grounded in a belief I still hold: that the answers to systemic problems rarely come from within the institutions that created them. Bringing in fintech firms, charities, and social enterprises was an attempt to find approaches that a large financial services organisation might not generate internally.

The most interesting ideas tended to share a few things in common. They started with the lived experience of women — not assumptions about what women want, but actual conversations about what was getting in the way. They were designed to reduce friction rather than add steps. And they treated engagement as a behaviour change challenge, not just a communications one.

PensionBee has partnered with female-focused organisations to provide tailored financial education to women and minority gender groups, with a stated commitment that a happy retirement is only possible if no one is left behind. That kind of targeted, community-level approach is what moves the needle. Generic pension communications do not.

What the forum also surfaced was how much the solutions need to go beyond product and communication design. The structural causes — the pay gap, the childcare system, the design of auto-enrolment — require policy intervention as well as commercial innovation. The Women's Budget Group has called for mechanisms to recognise unpaid care work in pension entitlements, including carer credits within private schemes, and for equality impact assessments to be embedded in all new pension policy development. These are not fringe asks. They are practical, implementable steps that would make a material difference.

Where we are now

In July 2025, the government launched a Pensions Commission to explore long-term questions of adequacy and retirement outcomes. That is a meaningful step. The question is whether the Commission will treat the gender pension gap as a central concern, or as a footnote to broader adequacy questions.

The financial services industry — and the fintech sector alongside it — has a role to play that does not depend on waiting for that Commission to report. The engagement gap is real and it is addressable now. Women want to understand their financial futures. They want products and communications that speak to their actual circumstances. They want employers who treat the gender pension gap as something worth actively reducing, not just acknowledging.

The Innovation Forum was one attempt to catalyse that kind of thinking. There need to be many more — and they need to lead somewhere beyond the forum itself.