The Gender Pay Gap in UK Insurance: Progress, Patterns and Persistent Gaps

October 7, 2025 | Michael Stefan

When the UK introduced mandatory gender pay gap (“GPG”) reporting in 2018, the insurance sector started from a challenging position. For the first reporting season, over 100 insurers and brokers filed their GPG reports:

  • The median hourly pay gap was 29.2%.
  • The mean gap was 32%.
  • Women earned 71p for every £1 earned by men.

Seven years on, the picture has evolved. The 2025 reporting cycle, covering 138 firms, reveals a mix of progress and plateauing. The median pay gap now stands at 22.1% and the mean at 24.6%, a steady but slow improvement of around one percentage point per year. The typical woman in insurance now earns 78p to the male pound. 

The latest data also offers a clue to where real progress lies. Beneath the headline figures, I see a clear pattern emerging that links pay equality closely with who occupies the highest-earning roles.

Headline numbers by segment

For clarity, this brief analysis compares the full pre-pandemic reports from 2018-2019 with the latest 2025 data, excluding 2020-2023 filings due to inconsistent reporting during that period.

Looking at location:

  • London-based firms began with the widest gap (32.8%) and remain above average, now at 24.4%.
  • Regional employers have fared better, cutting their gap to 13.8%, around 12p closer to parity per pound than the capital.
  • London still drives much of the overall disparity given its concentration of large, global firms.

Looking at business type:

  • Insurers and brokers started at similar levels: just above 29% in 2018.
  • By 2025, insurers have narrowed to 21.8% while brokers are at 24.2%.
  • The difference partly reflects pay structure: brokerage earnings are often tied to deal-based commissions, where a few high-earning men can make the averages look higher.

Looking at company size:

  • In 2018, smaller firms (<1,000 employees) had the widest gaps. In 2025, they show the narrowest, at 20.3%.
  • Large employers (5,000+ staff) report 24.7%.
  • Mid-sized organisations (1,000–4,999) sit between them at 24.0%.

Senior representation shapes the pay gap

The strongest factor influencing the overall pay gap is how many women hold positions in the top quarter of earners. In 2018, women made up 27% of the top-paid quartile. By 2025, that share has reached 31%, a four-point rise that mirrors the four-point drop in the sector’s median pay gap.

In practical terms, where women hold <25% of top-tier roles, the median gap is 31%. Where they hold 35%+, the gap shrinks to 12.5%. Representation is therefore the pivot point. The more women in senior pay bands, the smaller the overall gap.

Regional and organisational contrasts

Similar patterns can be seen across location, business type and company size when it comes to women’s representation in higher-paying roles:

  • Regional firms report the strongest representation of women in senior pay bands (37%) compared with 28% in London.
  • Insurers slightly outperform brokers (32% vs 28%), aided by their use of structured progression routes.
  • Mid-sized firms show the most balanced leadership mix at 35%, suggesting that greater representation of women isn’t dependent on scale or budget.

Even so, over 80% of firms still have fewer than 40% women among their highest earners, and the share crossing that threshold has only increased by two points since 2018.

The bottleneck remains

Women now make up a majority in the lower half of the pay scale but progress slows sharply above that. Until this upper-quartile imbalance shifts, pay gap improvements will remain incremental.

Firms showing the narrowest gaps, typically in the low teens, are those where women make up 40%+ of the highest-paid group, and pay practices are transparent and independently reviewed. Replicating that approach sector-wide could quicken the pace of change, and bring single-digit gaps within reach far earlier.

A decade of partial process

Across seven years, UK insurance has closed roughly seven points of a 29-point gap, a meaningful but modest advance.

The evidence across 138 reports is clear: firms that raise women’s representation at the top see faster progress on pay equality. Without sustained change in that upper quartile, double-digit gaps are likely to persist into the late 2030s.