Women in the UK will not be paid the same as men until 2056 at the current rate of progress, according to a Trades Union Congress report.
The gender pay gap, which stands at £2,548 a year, means that women have in effect worked for nothing so far this year, the TUC said.
The report by the umbrella body says the pace at which women’s earnings are increasing relative to men’s is so slow that the gap is not scheduled to close for 30 years.
“Women have effectively been working for free for the first month and a half of the year compared to men,” said the TUC’s general secretary, Paul Nowak.
“Imagine turning up to work every single day and not getting paid. That’s the reality of the gender pay gap. In 2026 that should be unthinkable. With the cost of living still biting hard, women simply can’t afford to keep losing out. They deserve their fair share.”
Inequality widens as women age, the report found, because they are more likely than men to take on unpaid caring responsibilities throughout their lives and are not sufficiently supported by childcare, social care provision and flexible working.
The pay gap, which stands at 12.8% overall, was found to be larger in some sectors than others. In the water industry, women earn 3% more than men on average, while in the accommodation and food sectors, as well as in agriculture, they only fall 3% short of men.
But women in education earn 17% less than their male peers; in finance and insurance the discrepancy rises to 27.2%.
Nowak said the Employment Rights Act, introduced by Labour last year, could help to tackle the gender pay gap and other employment rights problems. He said the legislation was “an important step forward for pay parity for women.
“It will ban exploitative zero-hours contracts, which disproportionately hit women and their pay packets. It will make employers publish action plans for tackling their gender gaps, but these plans must be tough, ambitious and built to deliver real change, otherwise they won’t work.”
The gender pay gap may have been underestimated for more than 20 years, according to research released by the British Journal of Industrial Relations in August last year.
Researchers found that the Office for National Statistics had failed to properly account for the fact that it received more data from larger employers, when it reported its annual survey of hours and earnings.
