This International Women’s Day, Frontier Economics have helped Scottish Widows create their new ‘Beat the Gap’ tool that is helping to highlight discrepancies in retirement funds between the genders.

Powered by Frontier’s modelling, the tool sets out a few questions to demonstrate how the gender pension gap could unfold over people’s working lives, and builds on our previous work helping Scottish Widow compile their 2023 Women & Retirement report.

Despite being over twice the size of the gender wage gap, few people know about the gender pension gap, and even fewer talk about the impact that life events and decisions have on this inequality.  

Our modelling shows that the gender pension gap grows from £100 to £100,000 over the average woman’s working life (ages 22 to 65).

The gap typically begins to widen after women have children, with factors like childcare, employment breaks and part-time working driving the gap ever-larger. Analysis of data from the Office of National Statistics shows that pay is also a big factor; although progress has been made in closing the gap, the lower earning points over women’s working lives contribute to their saving less into pension pots.

Our work providing the underlying analysis for the tool is helping Scottish Widows give women with information they need to navigate the UK pension system, and work to the goal of becoming the first generation to achieve pensions equality.

The tool is now available to use at beatthegap.com

Frontier regularly advises on public policy issues in the financial services sector.

For more information, please contact media@frontier-economics.com or call +44 (0) 20 7031 7000.