Closing the gender pay gap: Are policies fit for purpose?

Last week saw the release of PwC’s 9th Gender Pay Gap Report which showed another year of steady progress. It also follows the UK Government’s recent introduction of mandatory requirements for employers with 250 or more employees to publish an action plan alongside their gender pay gap data (coming into force in 2027). But what impact are these measures having on closing the gap?

Diving into the data, the latest figures suggest incremental improvement, but they also reinforce a sense of policy drift. Since mandatory reporting began in 2017, many organisations have settled into an all-too-familiar script: acknowledging the gap, citing mean and median figures that only partially capture underlying inequalities, and highlighting initiatives such as mentoring programmes. These interventions often fall into a ‘fix the women’ framing, focusing on individual behaviours rather than substantive organisational structures that produce pay disparities in the first place.

The result is minimal year‑on‑year movement without meaningful transformation. Even the emerging requirement for action plans risks becoming a tick‑box exercise, reliant on pre‑set menus of interventions. Unless grounded in robust evidence, this approach will not tackle core structural issues such as job design or progression pathways. It will also lack clear, scientific approaches to monitoring impact.

Against this backdrop, the EU Pay Transparency Directive stands out as a potentially transformative shift because it places the onus on organisations rather than individuals and introduces concrete mechanisms such as salary transparency in job adverts. That kind of structural intervention is far more likely to disrupt entrenched inequalities than the more performative measures that we’ve seen to date. This is of particular concern for SMEs where gaps are often larger and overly shaped by trends or media-driven priorities rather than sustained, evidence-based reform.

If policymakers are serious about accelerating progress, aligning more closely with this model would be a logical step. Without it, there is a risk that, nine years on from the introduction of reporting, progress will continue to be slow and uneven.