Women and FIRE in the UK: The Maths Is Harder

The UK gender pay gap is 0.9% before women have children, and 12.5% afterwards. It is a motherhood gap with a wage tag, not an age effect.

The gender pension gap is now £113,000 between the average woman and man at retirement. The median woman retires with £173,000, the median man with £286,000.

The £10,000 auto-enrolment earnings trigger excludes 2.5 million UK women (17% of female employees) from any workplace pension at all, versus 8% of male employees. This is a policy choice, not a behavioural one.

The individual playbook works around the structural problem; it does not solve it. Split Shared Parental Leave so the pension hit is shared, fund a SIPP during any career break, and use salary sacrifice on the return-to-work salary - that is where the closeable share of the gap lives.