The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) has found that women in some of the UK’s leading finance companies receive around 80 per cent less in performance related pay than male colleagues. The Finance Sector Inquiry has revealed that nearly all women taking up new jobs in the financial service companies they canvassed for the survey still start on lower average salaries than men. The gender pay gap has been widely regarded as a problem for some time but this new information points to the problem being exacerbated by recruitment patterns. Age patterns also seem to hinder women’s ability to thrive in this area as an unusually high proportion of workers in the sector fall into the 25-39 age group - the age at which women tend to have childcare responsibilities.

As a whole, the finance sector has one of the highest overall gender pay gaps in the UK economy - with women working full-time earning 55 per cent less annual gross salary than men. This compares to a pay gap of 28 per cent for the economy generally. The EHRC has committed to further investigation of the problem to seek out more targeted solutions.