UK women save more into ISAs than men – but are not buying shares
Key Points
- UK employers must keep paying pension contributions at full pre-leave salary throughout paid maternity leave
- Employee contributions fall during leave because they are worked out on actual maternity pay
- DWP puts the gender pensions gap at 48% for people aged 55 to 59, or 62% including those with no pension at all
- The gap starts at 22% in the late twenties and reaches 52% by the late forties
- Employer matching and percentage-of-salary contributions are the two checks AJ Bell flags
Women made 51.6% of all UK ISA subscriptions in 2022/23 but only 42% of subscriptions to stocks and shares ISAs, HMRC figures show.
Women accounted for 56% of cash ISA subscriptions over the same year, against 44% for men. The figures come from HMRC’s annual savings statistics, where the breakdown by age and sex runs around 18 months behind the headline subscription totals, leaving 2022/23 as the most recent year available.
Sarah Coles, Head of Personal Finance at AJ Bell, linked the weighting towards cash to the gender pay gap and to less secure incomes, which leave some savers feeling they cannot carry the risk they associate with investing.
She said savers tend to overstate the risk of investment losses and understate the risk that inflation erodes the value of cash over long periods.
The pay gap itself has narrowed. The Office for National Statistics measured it at 7% for full-time employees and 13% across all employees in 2025, down from 10% and 19% a decade earlier.
The cash weighting compounds into retirement. The Department for Work and Pensions put the gender pensions gap at 48% for people aged 55 to 59 between 2020 and 2022, with median private pension wealth of £81,000 for women and £156,000 for men.
HMRC estimates 18.9 million women and 21.9 million men will pay income tax in 2026/27, putting women at 46.3% of all income taxpayers, up from 43% a decade ago.
Coles said employees should check whether their employer matches contributions above the auto-enrolment minimum, and should set their own contribution as a percentage of salary rather than a fixed sum, so payments rise automatically with pay.
She added that couples splitting caring responsibilities should treat pension provision as part of the same conversation as the mortgage and household bills, rather than leaving it out of the household budget.
