Working Paper 45: Women in London’s economy - Update 2010

This report updates the figures for the Women in London's Economy series. It shows that the position of women in the workforce remains essentially unchanged over the last decade. Policies to improve the proportion of women working in London and reduce the gender pay gap are having limited effect so need a radical re-thinking if women are to improve their position within the economy.

• For full time workers, London has a higher gender pay gap at the median than the rest of the country with females earning 87p for each £1 earned by males. For the top 10 percent of earners in London the gender pay gap increases to a staggering 31 percent.
• Mothers with dependent children resident in London are less likely to be employed than mothers with dependent children elsewhere in the country with employment rates of 53 percent in London compared to 65 percent for females across the UK. Lone mothers in London have a lower employment rate than Lone mothers in the rest of the country.
• There is still a clear under representation of women in senior roles in business as demonstrated by the lack of female directors in FTSE 100 companies where only 16 companies had female executive directors, and overall only 5.5 percent of all FTSE 100 executive directors are females. Furthermore, there are 21 companies without any female directors, and this includes non-executive directors.