Making jobs work for women in the West
How data is driving policy to make work more equitable for women in the West of England.
The West of England Women’s Commission has been working closely with the West of England Combined Authority to understand women’s experience in the labour market in our region.
Data has been collected which is helping to inform policies that not only promote economic growth but also ensure equality.
The findings are detailed in the recently published annual State of the West of England Report, which tracks the region’s progress.
Key findings:
Women make up just over half (50.7%) the region[SF1] , with the largest group being aged 16 – 64.
Women in the West of England are more likely to be in work than women nationally; in 2025, 77.8% of women aged 16–64 were in employment compared with 72.7% in England as a whole.
·Women are far more likely to be economically inactive because they are looking after family members/home (25.6% vs 7.3% of men).
·Across the West of England, the gender pay gap remains higher than the national average.
What it means for women in the West
While we have a higher proportion of women in work in our region than is the case nationally, substantial gender pay gaps remain within the employed population, and more women than men are economically inactive. For women this is considerably more likely to be because they are looking after family or home than for men.
That is important from a policy perspective because it demonstrates why headline measures alone do not tell us the whole story. A region can have high employment, within a labour market that still presents barriers to particular groups, affecting participation, security, progression and pay.
What the wider evidence also shows is that access to opportunity remains uneven. The Skills Strategy identifies childcare, transport and digital access as barriers which vary across the region, while employment and earnings gaps persist for women and some other groups.
The policy challenge is therefore not only creating employment, but ensuring residents from different backgrounds and places can access and progress within those opportunities.
The cost of caring
Fundamentally, of course, this reflects the still highly gendered cultural expectation of who provides unpaid care. This means that the problems preventing those providing care from participating in the labour market end up disproportionally affecting women.
For example, the Skills Strategy identifies childcare costs and availability as restricting employment, while the Get West of England Working Plan recognises that insufficient or expensive childcare can lead parents and carers to reduce their hours or miss progression opportunities.
What this means is that there are two issues to tackle: making it easier for those who are responsible for caring to access work, which should benefit parents and carers of any gender. But also, we need to look at why it is that the choice about which parent or carer will reduce their access to work in response to costs and barriers, evidently still disproportionately results in women ‘taking the hit’.
This may be in part due to cultural and social norms, but it may also be in part because of disparities within pay and progression opportunities within the labour market that in turn reinforce those norms. If two parents with different earnings levels have to choose who will reduce their working hours, because childcare or transport is too expensive to make it worthwhile to continue to work, then the rational choice will often appear to be that the higher earner remains in work.
For as long as the trend remains that this earnings disparity is gendered, then women will continue to be disproportionately affected as a knock-on impact of a system that does not make it easy for anyone to undertake unpaid care as well as participate in the labour market.
It is also important to note this issue applies not only to childcare: caring can include looking after older or disabled relatives as well as children; and the social labour of providing unpaid informal support more broadly within communities. All of these caring and social labour activities remain gendered across many parts of our society.
Tackling the pay gap
The median gender pay gap is above the England average in three of the four local authority areas, and broadly in line with it in Bristol. It ranges from 13.4% in Bristol to 20.1% in North Somerset, compared with 13.3% across England.
The statistics tell us the size of the gap, but they do not tell us its cause. It is important to distinguish the ‘gender pay gap’ from ‘unequal pay for the same work”’ The gender pay gap measures differences in average hourly earnings across male and female employees, across all the different jobs and sectors in a place.
There are a number of factors that can contribute to gender pay gaps. Our regional evidence shows that caring responsibilities disproportionately affect women's labour market participation and that childcare can affect both the hours parents work and their ability to take progression opportunities.
A localised approach
It is also important to recognise that the four local authority areas in the West differ in many ways, including their demographics, local economies, types of jobs available, transport connectivity and living costs.
Bath & North East Somerset stands out as having a higher gender pay gap compared with the others, but this could be affected by the number of very high salaries, suggesting that men are more represented among the highest earners, which is pulling up average male pay. The health and social work sector employs the largest number of people in that region (!3.4%) followed by education.
South Gloucestershire has the largest number of jobs in wholesale and retail trade of the region, while Bristol has a significant proportion working in professional/scientific /technical jobs.
These differences shape local labour markets, and although this analysis does not tell us how much each factor contributes to the pay gap, we know it is important to look beneath the regional averages to understand what kinds of interventions might target local inequalities.
What’s being done?
There is already a strong policy focus on this. The West of England Combined Authority has three main approaches in its regional strategy:
Improving women's ability to enter, remain in, and progress through the labour market.
Driving up the quality of work within sectors that tend to offer more part time and flexible work or have a workforce gender balance more tipped to women.
Increasing the quantity of good quality work that is ‘care friendly’ within sectors historically perceived to be less flexible for those with caring responsibilities, or sectors with a higher proportion of men in the workforce – both to equalise gender representation but also to ensure that men are also facilitated to undertake a greater share of caring responsibilities.
These are set out across several of the current strategies and plans, including:
Get West of England Working Plan: Aims to get more people into work, but also to get more residents into better-paid, more secure work and help people progress rather than cycle between low-paid or insecure employment and unemployment.
Skills Strategy: Breaking down barriers to work and training, including childcare, caring responsibilities, confidence, language and access to flexible learning. It also aims to connect residents more effectively with opportunities in the region's growth sectors and support progression in work.
Growth Strategy: Creating better-paid jobs with career progression, improving access to affordable childcare and helping residents gain the skills needed to access future employment opportunities.
Child Poverty Action Plan: Specific commitments to help more parents return to work and progress in employment through tailored pathways, alongside working with employers to recruit, retain and upskill local talent.
