News

09/03/23

Following on from International Woman’s Day yesterday,

Here are a few interesting stats to support what an incredible contribution working women make to the UK economy.

There are 15.66 million working women in the UK today aged 16 and over and 1.7 million up to 10 years earlier.

Women are still more likely to work part-time than men, although this is down from its height in the 1990s, this may have something to do with the recession in the early 90s and also the shift in childcare availability and the contribution from the government to support women back into the workplace.

283,000 more women are self-employed than 10 years ago, with 1.47 million during Oct-Dec 2022, these numbers fell during the pandemic, and numbers into full-time employment increased. This could have been due to roles in the NHS and Government with track and trace and vaccination centres etc.

Women dominate certain industry sectors, Health and Social Care, Education with 77% of the jobs in Health and Social Care and 70% of jobs in education held by women.

There are fewer women who are economically inactive than men but as the rates are falling for women they are increasing for men. Women’s rates were affected by the change in retirement age in 1995, when women’s retirement age increased from 60-65 and then to 66, this came into effect between 2010 and 2020.

The gender pay gap remains, with the mean average weekly salary for a man at £683 and for a woman at £584, most of this can be attributed to childcare and parenthood, where men are unaffected by this, research found that 7 years after childbirth a woman’s pay was on average half that of a man.

Employers are never going to be able to bridge this difference with the majority of women still choosing to be the main care provider.

At Axiom we encourage and support our female staff to work flexibly and to grow with our business.