There has been barely any change to the gender earning gap in a quarter of a century once female education is taken into account, research has found.
According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies think-tank, the average working-age woman in the UK earned 40 per cent less than her male counterpart in 2019.
This gap is about 13 percentage points lower than in the mid-1990s. But over three-quarters of the reduction in the earning gap over the past 25 years can be explained by the rapid increase in women’s educational attainment over that period.
Women of working age have gone from being 5 percentage points less to likely to have a university degree than men, to 5 percentage points more likely.
The think-tank said this suggested that it is only because of the increase in female educational attainment that there has been any meaningful progress in closing the gender earnings gap.
Other changes in the economy, society and policy – such as extra public support for childcare – have only made a “comparatively small” contribution to reducing the gap, it said.
The IFS said that the…
