The gender employment gap across London is still relatively wide, despite advances in policy and flexible working since the COVID-19 pandemic, new data shows.
While 18 of 33 London boroughs closed their gender employment gap between 2019 and 2024, women in the capital remain on average 10% less likely to be employed than men, according to Office for National Statistics data.
While flexible working during Covid-19 is credited as helping to close the gap as offices were shut down by the pandemic, now that employers are pushing staff back to desks five days a week, those gains risk disappearing.
Liz Sewell, director of Belina Grow, an organization supporting women returning to work, said: “What Covid did was throw everything up in the air and create an emergency situation,
“Everybody was willing to do absolutely everything – flexible, hybrid, work the hours you need. Now it’s the opposite. Employers are trying to reset and take back control.”
Boroughs like Hackney saw women’s employment rise from 72% in 2019 to 83% by 2021, or Greenwich that climbed from 76% to 85% by 2023.
And the trend is particularly noticeable in Hounslow, where women peaked at 77.5% employment in 2020, only to fall to 62% by 2024, a 15-point reversal.
Sewell added: “If you’re a single bloke and you’re 20 and you can work full-time then you’re in a very different position than you are if you’ve got two children and you’ve got to sort out the childcare.
“There still is a difference, because when you take that time out, and when you haven’t got all the time left to give when you go back to work, you are in a different situation.
“Just those factors alone, it’s going to take a mother longer to get into work than someone who’s a 20-year-old bloke.
“So much of the system is not designed around mothers being unemployed.”
Not all mothers benefited equally from pandemic-era changes, both geographically, with those in London less likely to return to work, as well as ethnicity disparities.
Laura Dewar, Head of Research at Belina Grow, and a policy influencer who has worked with parliamentarians, identified a two-tiered system to return to work.
She said: “In London, generally, the employment rate for mothers is lower than it is nationally. They’re less likely to return to work within five years of having a child.
“Some mothers post-pandemic have done really well, but it’s a certain model of families, two parents generally doing quite middle-class jobs where they’ve gone on maternity leave and they’ve kept their job and they’ve gone back to work after maternity leave.
“If you’re a lawyer who really specializes in a particular area of law, you can go for a job that’s advertised full time and say, ‘You’re really going to want me.’
“But if you’re talking about a retail job where hundreds of people have applied, and you go, ‘I can’t do those shifts’, there’s going to be a queue of people who can work in a different way than you.”
This helps explain London’s geographic disparities as inner London boroughs show vastly different outcomes.
For example, Islington’s gender gap closed entirely (84% men, 85% women in 2024), while neighbouring Kensington & Chelsea saw women’s rates plummet to 58%.
In outer London, Hillingdon’s dramatic rise, women jumping from 67% to 86%, even surpassing men’s 79%, contrasts sharply with Richmond upon Thames, where women dropped from 78% to 70%.
Employment figures mask deeper structural problems and many women seeking work face barriers the statistics cannot capture.
Dewar said: “A lot of women we work with are on spousal visas. They’re entitled to work here but not entitled to any free childcare.
“The expanded childcare offer doesn’t apply to them, nor does support under Universal Credit.”
This particularly affects boroughs with large migrant populations.
Tower Hamlets, despite narrowing its gender gap from 29 percentage points in 2019 to 10 in 2024, remains among London’s worst performers.
Jane Knight, founder of Successful Mums, which helps mothers gain employment skills, identifies what she called ‘the three C’s: confidence, career advice, and childcare’, as a major factor inhibiting women of all ages and backgrounds from returning to work.
She said: “Being a mum is the hardest job. They’ve got so many transferable skills – negotiation, conflict management, softer skills employers are looking for.
“Yet when I talk to parents in playgrounds, they say, ‘I’ve got nothing to offer. Who’s going to want me?’
“During the pandemic we supported people on the 10th floor of high-rise flats with no garden access, perhaps on their own with five kids.
“That isolation and mental health impact was particularly magnified in Covid.”
Moving training online helped reach women who previously lacked confidence to attend groups in person – but Knight noticed another trend.
She said: “About 18 months after Covid, we saw an influx of women over 50 who’d been made redundant, used their savings, and needed to return to work. Many were also going through separations or divorce.
“Some employers think someone over 50 won’t know anything. But that’s not the case.
“These women have good digital skills, want to learn more, are more committed, and have heaps of life experience.
“They’re probably not going to have another baby and will likely stay until retirement. Savvy employers target over-50s because they’ll be loyal staff.”
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