Insights for policy and data collection

Greater efforts are needed to reduce gender inequalities in time spent on unpaid care and domestic work, and in leadership, engagement and voice. A more equal gender division of unpaid work can be supported by greater access to flexible working arrangements, better-paid shared parental and paternity leave and greater access to affordable childcare.

A more gender equal division of unpaid work can also positively impact women’s ability to engage in political and community activities, although additional support structures must be put in place. For example, national and local government and political parties can support women’s political representation at different levels by committing to a balanced selection of candidates for councillors, ensured by the collection and publication of data on the diversity of candidates, as called for by the Fawcett Society and the Electoral Reform Society. Once in post, women councillors can be better supported by the introduction of parental leave and the provision of support for childcare and adult care costs.

Women also require better support to start and scale up businesses, which can stimulate employment growth, innovation and productivity. Greater efforts are needed to improve access to capital, care support and professional networks, as identified by the Rose Review. Additionally, there is much scope to strengthen self-employment rights, for example, by bringing maternity pay, parental leave allowance, sick pay and pension contributions closer into line with those enjoyed by employees.

Increasing men’s involvement in childcare and domestic work requires extending the right to request and access flexible working arrangements but also the introduction of non-transferrable parental leave and extensions to paid paternity leave – to a minimum of six weeks in the UK as currently being advocated by organisations including the Fatherhood Institute, The Dad Shift and Pregnant Then Screwed.

Further, campaigns to challenge traditional gender norms and stereotypes and family-friendly workplace policies can encourage men’s greater involvement in caregiving responsibilities. By removing logistical and cultural barriers, policymakers at both the national and local levels can encourage more egalitarian norms in unpaid work, ultimately benefiting individuals, families and broader communities alike.

The GEIUK shows that women’s part-time work is negatively associated with women’s socioeconomic outcomes and gender equality. Cultural changes are needed to counter stigmas around part-time work that result in negative outcomes for workers’ well-being and productivity.  Better access to flexible working arrangements – flexitime and remote working – can help women out of part-time employment. Similarly, increasing access to affordable and high-quality childcare and expanding the availability of free breakfast and after-school clubs can support parents, especially mothers, in maintaining greater labour market participation.

The GEIUK shows that local authorities with greater gender equality tend to exhibit higher economic activity, increased full-time employment and greater local productivity. Embedding gender-sensitive strategies into regional policies can foster more equitable and sustainable economic growth.

Labour markets are inherently gendered. A comprehensive gender analysis of both supply-side factors (such as health, education and caregiving responsibilities) and demand-side factors (including prevalent local sectors and workplace flexibility) can help identify untapped economic potential and areas for reform. This approach enables targeted investments in gender-inclusive initiatives and ensures that regional development strategies address contextual barriers.

The GEIUK provides a powerful framework for advancing these goals, offering a nuanced understanding of gender dynamics by examining differences both between and among women and men. These insights should guide the integration of gender equality objectives into national policies, including the government’s mission to ‘Kick-start the economy’ and the delivery of the ‘Invest 2035’ modern industrial strategy. The GEIUK can inform the design of evidence-based, context-specific interventions to unlock significant economic and social benefits while addressing persistent inequalities across the UK.

The development of the GEIUK offered insight into the quality of the UK gender data landscape, uncovering key gaps that require addressing to strengthen our understanding of gender and geographical inequalities. As the first iteration, the GEIUK sets a foundation and improvements to the UK's gender data landscape will in turn further strengthen its validity, application and potential for impact.

Greater efforts are required to further collect harmonised data across the four nations using consistent concepts and methodologies and sufficiently large sample sizes that permit granular analysis below the regional level. Adequately funding statistical agencies across the UK's four nations is a prerequisite to this.

Further, improvements to data on time spent on different forms of unpaid care, including child, grandchild and adult care, are needed. This calls for more frequent time-use surveys with larger sample sizes covering all four nations at the local level to monitor changes in the time spent on childcare, domestic work and leisure time. This could help advance the GEIUK’s measurement of the domain of Unpaid Work.

Improvements to individual-level private wealth indicators, such as savings and pension wealth, at the local authority level and across the four nations, would provide an enhanced measure of gender wealth inequalities in the domain of Money.

Additionally, collecting more multivariate data beyond sex-disaggregated data for intersectional analysis across age, ethnicity and other protected characteristics can enable deeper insights into gender and social inequalities across the UK.

Finally, data on violence against women and girls should be improved in line with recommendations put forward in our previous report (Schmid et al., 2024). This would allow the inclusion of a domain of Violence in future iterations of the GEIUK to examine the relationship between varying levels of gender equality, women’s and men’s socioeconomic status and incidences of violence against women and girls.