Women and men in the UK labour market, 2026

The data, in detail

In December 2025 to February 2026, 16.73 million women and 17.60 million men were in employment in the UK. The female employment rate was 72.3% and the male rate was 77.8%. The economic inactivity rate for women aged 16 to 64 was 24.1%, compared to 17.8% for men — although that gap has been narrowing steadily over the last decade as more women have moved from inactivity into employment.

PwC's Women in Work 2026 Index, which tracks UK female labour market progress against 33 OECD countries using 2024 data, found that UK female unemployment rose from 3.5% to 4.2% in 2024. That is the largest annual rise since the index began in 2011, and the rise was driven disproportionately by young women in the 18 to 24 bracket, whose unemployment rate jumped from 9.5% to 11.8% in the same period.

The regional picture is sharply uneven. London is the worst-performing UK region in the 2026 Women in Work regional index, with female unemployment of 5.2% — the highest of any UK region — and a high gender pay gap driven by London's sectoral mix (finance, education and professional services all have above-average gender pay gaps). The South West leads the regional index thanks to increasing job opportunities; Northern Ireland and Scotland perform relatively well thanks to higher shares of public sector employment.

What's shaping this picture

Cost-of-living pressures continue to draw women into (or back into) the workforce to stabilise household finances. The OECD has identified this as the primary driver of the 0.4 percentage point increase in OECD-wide female labour force participation in 2024. The challenge is that weaker labour demand has not kept pace: a 0.4pp rise in female participation was matched by a 0.2pp rise in female unemployment.

The Employment Rights Act 2025 provisions are particularly relevant to women returning to work after a career break or working flexibly: day-one statutory sick pay (removing the lower earnings limit, in force from April 2026), the planned right to guaranteed hours for zero-hours workers (from 2027), and protections that affect part-time and fixed-term contracts where women are over-represented.

The PwC Women in Work analysis flags compounded disadvantage for young women: those with health conditions plus poor GCSE attainment are four times more likely to be NEET. Policy and recruitment that addresses these intersectional drivers (not just gender alone) is where the biggest GDP opportunity sits: PwC modelled £3 billion in GDP gain from returning NEET rates to 2021 levels, £11 billion from matching the Netherlands.

If you're applying right now

• If you are returning to work after a career break, lead your CV with what you can deliver now, not with the gap. The gap is fully accepted in the current market; long explanations of it draw the eye away from your competence.
• Where flexibility matters (part-time, term-time, hybrid), state your preference clearly in the cover letter or summary. The post-pandemic UK hiring market is more comfortable accommodating flexible arrangements than it was, but it still needs to be asked for explicitly to be offered.
• London applicants in finance, professional services or education should weight regional alternatives. The female unemployment rate in London (5.2%) is the worst in the UK; if you are mobile, the South West, Scotland, and Northern Ireland have stronger female labour market conditions on the PwC index.
• Public sector hiring has the smallest gender pay gap of any major employment category in the UK. If pay equity is a deciding factor, civil service, NHS and local government roles are running at a structural advantage right now (with 5.2% public sector pay growth versus 3.2% private — the widest gap since the late 1990s).