3 Strategies to Support Women’s Advancement and Bridge the Gender Pay Gap

3 Strategies to Support Women’s Advancement and Bridge the Gender Pay Gap
February 21, 2025 19 mins

3 Strategies to Support Women’s Advancement and Bridge the Gender Pay Gap

3 Strategies to Support Women’s Advancement and Bridge the Gender Pay Gap

While women have made significant strides in the workforce, the gender pay gap persists. Discover how organizations can continue to make progress with interconnected policies and comprehensive programs that support female employees at every career and life stage.

Key Takeaways
  1. In light of evolving pay transparency regulations, organizations should focus on adopting equity measures to address any impermissible gender pay gap.
  2. Employers can positively support women’s advancement by focusing on policies that encourage the pursuit of new skills and jobs, help employees break into senior roles and allow for time off without penalties.
  3. Implementing personalized health and wellbeing programs that support women through various life stages is crucial to combating hurdles that hinder future career success.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction

  2. Ensure Transparency and Equity in Compensation

  3. Support Women’s Career Advancement

  4. Offer Personalized Benefits to Meet Individual Needs

  5. How to Design Health and Benefit Programs that Support Women

There has been significant progress made on women’s advancement in the workplace in the past 50 years, but more work remains — and organizations have an important role to play.

The latest pay transparency laws aim to promote equal pay for equal work and help combat the gender pay gap, which is still above 5 percent in many regions, a threshold goal of the European Union's (EU) Pay Transparency Directive. This wage gap persists for many reasons, including gender representation at the senior level and in higher-paying jobs, and career breaks that often fall on women to care for children or elderly family members. Career breaks have also been linked to fewer job promotions and wage and retirement earnings gaps.

Employers can positively support women in the workplace by focusing on policies that help support them throughout their career and life stages, such as:

  • encouraging women to pursue new skills and jobs
  • helping women grow into senior roles
  • supporting work breaks without penalties
  • introducing innovative retirement savings programs and offering benefits tailored to women’s needs, such as family building and menopause support

There is also a business case to be made for gender parity in leadership. Studies have found that businesses with gender-inclusive cultures and equal employment opportunity policies are 60 percent more likely to see improved profits and productivity. They are also 60 percent more likely to benefit from an enhanced reputation, have greater ease in attracting and retaining talent, as well as higher levels of creativity and innovation.1

Here are some strategies employers can implement to support women throughout their careers and promote equal opportunity in the workplace.

Ensure Transparency and Equity in Compensation

The global pay disparity between men and women remains significant at 20 percent.2 This gap extends beyond basic wages to other forms of compensation, such as retirement savings and affordable healthcare access.

The EU Pay Transparency Directive mandates that all 27 member countries pass legislation requiring companies with at least 100 employees to publish pay gaps by category of worker, alongside other key requirements. Any gaps of 5 percent or more between men and women doing similar work will require further justification. Pay gaps include salary, bonus and incentive pay, as well as pensions, defined contribution retirement plans and other benefits. This highlights the need for employers to understand the value of their benefits, how that value varies between employees performing the same category of work and whether those gaps can be explained by objective reasons.

The EU directive has far-reaching implications: It could raise employees’ expectations globally around pay transparency and pay equity, force employers to think more closely about addressing existing gaps and more broadly influence the development of future regulation beyond the EU.

18%

of employees globally are not confident their employer ensures pay equity. That figure increases substantially in Japan (48 percent), Hong Kong (40 percent), Singapore (35 percent) and Italy (30 percent).

Source: Aon’s 2025 Employee Sentiment Study

Learn More

In the meantime, pay transparency regulations have already taken effect in various jurisdictions:

  • Pay transparency regulations in various U.S. states and cities, including California and New York City, require disclosure of job pay ranges for both open positions and current employees requesting the ranges. Some laws also ban discussing a job candidate’s salary history.
  • The UK government launched a pay transparency pilot scheme in 2022 that encouraged organizations to display salaries in all their job ads, though the pilot was abandoned in 2024. Currently, any UK employer with 250 or more employees must report their gender pay gap data each year. Moreover, through the proposed Equality (Race and Disability) Bill, employers with more than 250 staff members could be legally required to publish ethnicity and disability pay gaps.
  • Japan requires companies to increase disclosure of their gender wage gap by listing it on company websites and annual securities reports.

Cultural changes around pay transparency and equity are evolving at the same time. Yet despite the push for pay transparency, many companies are still unprepared for the EU legislation, which comes into full force in June 2026.

134

Based on current data, it will take 134 years to reach full gender pay parity — roughly five generations beyond the 2030 Sustainable Development Goal target.

Source: World Economic Forum

The Gender Pay Gap Extends into Retirement

The pay gap not only has impacts throughout the course of a career, but also into retirement. Women aged 65 or older receive around 74 percent of the retirement income of men on average.3 This disparity is statistically significant in virtually every retirement system in the world.

The gender retirement savings gap stems from many causes, the main one being that women generally earn less than men over their careers — but the reasons for this are multidimensional:

  1. Women are more likely to have non-traditional working patterns and retirement plan design often favors traditional career paths. Breaks in full-time work are often due to the increased likelihood of women caring for children and elderly parents.
  2. Women make investment and retirement saving decisions differently and have more barriers to saving than men. Additionally, women who work full-time and year-round are paid less than comparable men, so they are drawing from a smaller pot when they do save for retirement. Women in the U.S. have annual retirement contributions of $4,521 compared to $6,103 for men, according to Aon’s DC pension and financial wellbeing employee research.
  3. Women live longer on average than men and need more retirement savings, which makes the retirement savings gap even more concerning. Women retiring at age 67 are expected to outlive men by two years. This means that women need about 10 percent more savings to achieve the same standard of living in retirement as men.

Gaps in retirement also align with broader gender gaps in investments and savings. As a result of these trends, women report 77 cents in wealth for every dollar of wealth reported by men in the U.S.4

18%

of North American companies feel that they are ready for pay transparency.

Source: Aon’s 2024 North America Pay Transparency Readiness Study

Learn More
Quote icon

We still see employers giving the biggest financial wellbeing perks to the highest earners and performers — and they're the ones who need it less. One change that organizations can make is providing financial wellbeing support for lower paid workers, who are disproportionately women, through benefits like a higher matching contribution for pension savings.

Fleur Iannazzo
Associate Partner, Financial Wellbeing, Wealth Solutions, United Kingdom

How Organizations Can Address Pay and Retirement Gaps

By implementing strategies to support pay transparency and equity, organizations can help support long-term financial wellbeing for their employees, leading to a healthier and more engaged workforce.

Stay ahead of the curve by assessing your existing practices and consider implementing new practices that align with evolving regulations, such as:

  • Conducting regular pay equity audits to identify and address impermissible gender-based wage gaps
  • Implementing transparent compensation frameworks to mitigate risks associated with pay gaps, especially in light of the EU directive
  • Using gender-neutral tools and criteria to compare jobs of equal value, including gender-neutral and analytical job evaluation and classification systems
  • Having clear systems and policies to support reward and promotion decision processes, which should be broad enough to reflect different strengths and leadership styles
  • Assessing how robust and consistent your current approach is to performance management as a rationale for pay differentiation
  • Developing retirement benefits that provide a basic level of retirement income regardless of one’s ability to save, including minimal eligibility and vesting requirements and features to promote saving, like automatic enrollment and escalation
  • Providing opportunities for financial wellbeing education, including tailored discussions around life stages, to help build confidence in investment and savings decisions
  • Offering specific guidance and tools to help employees get a handle on planning their financial future

The crucial takeaway for leaders is that the answer is not one-size-fits-all. There should be many layers in place to help address pay and retirement gaps and align business practices with evolving regulations — and implementing a holistic approach involves overcoming any fears that leaders may have about bringing up the still-taboo topic of money.

“It can be a sensitive situation for employers because the assumption is if you talk about money with your employees, they'll ask for a raise. However, talking about money can mean talking about attitudes and pressures, what money means to employees and how they’ve developed their habits around financial wellbeing,” explains Fleur Iannazzo, an associate partner and financial wellbeing coach at Aon in the United Kingdom. “When tackling the conversation around financial wellbeing, employers can think about what actions they put in place to make talking about mental health, for example, easier for people to do in the workplace. They can then use the same structures across employee benefit schemes to promote financial wellbeing.”

Support Women’s Career Advancement

Supporting women in the workplace extends beyond pay and retirement benefits. If women are challenged to advance in their positions due to other roadblocks, their financial wellbeing can be impacted in the long term.

While the “glass ceiling” is well-known as a barrier to advancement into senior leadership positions, studies are suggesting that the “broken rung” is a significant contributing factor. This term refers to women experiencing difficulties in career advancement much earlier in their career, especially in their first move into management.

A 2023 study in Germany found that 32.2 percent of men were in a management position compared to 17.6 percent of women. The gender disparity was most evident in parenthood and children: 11.4 percent of the women surveyed named these as reasons why they no longer have management responsibility, while for men it was only 3.2 percent.5 Parenthood in turn impacts women’s earning potential. A 2024 study by The Institute for Fiscal Studies in the UK found that seven years after the birth of a first child, women’s earnings were on average less than half of men’s.

Ageism also disproportionately affects women in the workplace on either end of the age spectrum. In England and Wales, the number of young women being discriminated against is at a three-year high, with more than half reporting they have experienced ageism in 2024.6

  • 77.8%

    of women have encountered age-related discrimination in their careers.

    Source: Women of Influence+

  • 80.7%

    of women have witnessed other women being treated differently because of their age.

Return-to-Office Mandates

Women have likewise been more impacted by recent return-to-office (RTO) policies, in part because they typically manage caregiving duties. When it comes to childcare, women tend to make multiple short trips for school and childcare drop-offs. As a result, women can face greater difficulties in commuting due to staggered start and finish times at workplaces, schools and nurseries, as well as limitations on public transport schedules and capacity.7 They are also more likely to be the single parent in those households, adding more pressure.8 Further, women’s wellbeing can be more impacted by RTO,9 causing some to quit their jobs.

Companies should consider the implications of RTO policies, taking into account what benefits, including flexibility, employees value and what jobs can be done in a remote or hybrid work environment, and then weigh those against the benefits of in-person work.

4x

In Asia Pacific, women provide four times more unpaid care than men at the cost of their own health, wellbeing and economic prosperity.

Source: UN Women

Strengthening Policies that Support Women in the Workplace

Organizations can help women overcome challenges they may face when advancing in their careers by taking the following actions:

  1. Implement inclusive systems and processes that work to eliminate biases in the recruitment and promotion processes.
  2. Consider moving away from one-size-fits-all hybrid work policies to options that offer part-time and work-from-home arrangements based on employee needs. 
  3. Provide programmatic support to women during and following maternity, including return-to-work programs, re-onboarding/ramp-up programs, job sharing and cross-training to ease with the distribution of workloads.
  4. Introduce policies that ensure pay raises, bonuses and promotions continue during maternity leave, and ensure paternity leave and pay policies that support women's progression.
  5. Implement structured, objective hiring and promotion criteria and processes to minimize the impact of bias, including standardized interview questions, objective competency and skills assessments linked to job performance, balanced hiring panels and blind resume screening to ensure women have equal opportunities for advancement.
  6. Use data, analytics and strategic workforce planning to empower employees and leadership. Aon’s tools can show gender distribution by industry, level, role and geography. These tools, mostly available in the U.S., can also display promotion and turnover rate by gender. This can help organizations understand how they stand versus their peers, proactively address challenges and opportunities, and help inform workforce equality and equity strategies.
  7. Regularly share objective metrics that are reflective of equity with employees and stakeholders to demonstrate their company’s commitment to the cause.

8%

Hybrid employees are 8 percent more likely to describe their wellbeing as thriving or generally good.

Source: Aon’s 2025 Employee Sentiment Study

Offer Personalized Benefits to Meet Individual Needs

Providing choice in health and wellbeing benefits is another way companies can support women in the workplace. Moreover, women’s health issues are far-reaching. If 20 percent of a company’s population is going through menopause or struggling to start a family and not feeling supported, absenteeism may be higher, more employees will be disengaged and some will likely quit. Those costs add up.

25%

Despite living longer than men, women spend 25 percent more of their lives in poor health.

Source: World Economic Forum

The current healthcare landscape presents three main challenges related to women’s health:

  1. Access to quality clinical care: There are significant coverage and knowledge gaps for women’s healthcare. Women (as well as racial and ethnic minorities) are often underrepresented in clinical research, leading to sub-optimal knowledge across the provider community for diagnosing and prescribing effective treatments. Research tends to focus on diseases with high mortality, overlooking diseases leading to disability.10
  2. The cost and affordability of care: There is unequal cost sharing across gender-specific clinical needs and sometimes high prices on gender-specific products and services. Women are therefore more likely to be impacted by affordability challenges. In addition to high costs, women on average use more healthcare services, especially during their working years.
  3. Total rewards and workplace culture: Employers should examine benefits to make quality healthcare more accessible and affordable for all employees, while also addressing broader reward inequities and workplace culture. A key finding from Aon’s 2025 Employee Sentiment Study was that employers are failing to accommodate differing needs. There are areas where employers could be more inclusive in their benefit offerings to foster good health, resilience and productivity for all employees.

  • 37%

    of employees say companies should support women's health (e.g., menstruation, menopause).

    Source: Aon’s 2025 Employee Sentiment Study

  • 36%

    say employers should provide childcare support.

  • 72%

    believe benefit customization is important or extremely important.

Understanding and customizing plans to meet the unique needs of the workforce is a big step toward improving healthcare and benefits. And women’s health is a key part of this:

  • Menopause Support

    Workplace discussions on menopause have only emerged in the last five to 10 years, and awareness remains low. While Aon’s 2025 Health Survey shows that the percentage of U.S. companies offering menopause benefits increased from 9 percent in 2024 to 20 percent in 2025, other regions are trailing. Employers can lead by fostering supportive cultures and offering flexible work options and benefits to address menopause-related health issues.

  • Family Building

    The number of people facing infertility has increased by 20 percent in the past 25 years. Because of this, 71 percent of companies are considering providing fertility benefits to help meet the needs of their workforce. Family building affects both men and women. Although the benefits can vary, they usually encompass emotional, financial and clinical support for all individuals during their family-building journey, as well as legal support for surrogacy and adoption.

    Although employer recognition and support in this space are on the rise, there is still room for improvement. For example, 60 percent of LGBTQ+ couples have stated interest in starting families, yet insurance often doesn’t cover the costs.

    Many family building vendors are already including mental health support in their services, but organizations should consider adapting their leave policies to help support women in critical moments during family building, such as pregnancy loss, miscarriage, stillbirth and surrogacy.

  • Caregiving Support

    Companies can support employees taking on caregiving responsibilities by providing mental health support, back-up care support vendors, and subsidies or discounts for childcare and/or eldercare.

    When it comes to childcare specifically, paid leave, onsite childcare options, allowance or financial support for school and nursery costs, and flex work arrangements should all be considered in benefit program design.

  • Osteoporosis and Cancer Awareness

    Women are at more risk of developing osteoporosis than men because of the hormone changes that happen during menopause, which directly affect bone density. Other health concerns include cervical cancer, which is the fourth most common cancer in women globally,11 and breast cancer, which is the second most common cancer worldwide.12

    To address these health concerns, organizations can consider offering awareness and assistance for osteoporosis, as well as implementing screening, vaccination, prevention and cancer awareness initiatives.

$130B

Addressing endometriosis and menopause alone could contribute about $130 billion to global GDP impact by 2040.

Source: World Economic Forum

Quote icon

Some vendors can provide women with access to virtual healthcare providers that can help manage symptoms. For example, they can talk to an OB/GYN virtually, which is especially useful in rural areas where women have to travel long distances to access those services.

Melissa Tucker
Senior Vice President, Health Solutions, North America

How to Design Health and Benefit Programs that Support Women

Employers are increasingly incorporating family building and women’s health initiatives into their employee benefit programs to support the unique needs of all employees. Follow these three approaches to continue guiding this momentum forward:

  1. Use data and analytics. Analytics can help organizations identify opportunities to increase care access, reduce disparities in health outcomes and lower costs — some of the biggest barriers to supporting women’s health in the workplace. For example, Aon’s Health, Equity and Affordability Tool (HEAT) can help U.S. firms understand how healthcare costs and affordability are related to demographics, physical and mental health provider access, health habits, plan design, location, healthcare labor supply and work productivity.
  2. Review benefits. A range of women’s health and family-building benefits across all life stages and care needs are available for employers to tailor to their workforce population. In addition, employers are starting to offer more proactive solutions, including robust coverage of women’s preventative care, matching network providers with the unique needs of individuals, providing parenting and pediatric support, creating centers of excellence for fertility and family forming issues, and offering cover for women-specific surgeries such as hysterectomies.
  3. Educate and train the entire company. We need to change the way we think about women’s health in the workplace to address disparities, combat stigmas, and empower employees and managers. Training and resources, such as offering manager toolkits focused on education and support, should be available to all employees. Employers should also encourage women-focused business resource groups, including ones for new mothers or elder caregivers.

Addressing the women’s health gap has long-term benefits for individuals, organizations and economies. According to the World Economic Forum, investments targeting the women’s health gap could potentially boost the global economy by $1 trillion annually by 2040.

Following the above strategies can help organizations improve equity and promote the advancement of women. It can also help foster a healthier and more engaged workforce, strengthening a firm’s ability to attract and retain talent.

“Building an organizational culture where women can succeed and bridge the gender gap requires not only changing systems, processes and rewards, but also building a transparent and supportive workplace culture where women's health and financial wellbeing are prioritized,” says Katherine Conway, Aon’s global head of Inclusion and Cultural Initiatives. “A workplace culture of openness and inclusion can help women feel heard and supported, while improving business outcomes.”

Aon’s Thought Leaders

Joana Coelho
HR Consultant, Advisory and Specialty Team, Europe, Middle East and Africa

Katherine Conway
Global Head of Inclusion and Cultural Initiatives

Sandrine Decarnin
Human Capital Communications Leader, Europe, Middle East and Africa

Leona Dooley
Commercial Team Manager, United Kingdom

Natalia Guarin
Specialty Wellbeing Consultant, Latin America

Ray Henry
Pay Equity Leader, Workforce Transformation & Analytics, North America

Fleur Iannazzo
Associate Partner, Financial Wellbeing, United Kingdom

Adithi Jagannathan
Partner, Talent Advisory, United Kingdom

Grace Lattyak
Partner, Wealth Solutions, North America

Ik Onyiah
Associate Partner, Workforce Resilience, United Kingdom

Melissa Tucker
Senior Vice President, Health Transformation, North America

Marinus van Driel
Partner, Workforce Transformation & Analytics, Global

Rebecca Warnken
Inclusive Benefits Leader, Health Transformation, North America

1 Women Count 2024 Gender balance in FTSE 350 Excos and practical guidance on how to accelerate progress, The Pipeline
2 Equal pay for work of equal value, United Nations
3 Assessing the gender gap in retirement savings arrangements, OECD
4 How to improve women’s retirement security in 2025, U.S. Department of Labor
5 Work and Career: Equal Opportunities for All? IU International University of Applied Sciences
6 Workplace discrimination at a three year high for young women, Young Women’s Trust
7 Back to Business: Recovery and Growth Through Gender Equality, Close the Gap
8 The Economic Status of Single Mothers, Center for American Progress
9 Five Hybrid Work Trends to Watch in 2025, MIT Sloan Management Review
10 Closing the Women’s Health Gap: A $1 Trillion Opportunity to Improve Lives and Economies, World Economic Forum
11 Cervical cancer, World Health Organization
12 Breast cancer statistics, World Cancer Research Fund

General Disclaimer

The information contained herein and the statements expressed are of a general nature and are not intended to address the circumstances of any particular individual or entity. Although we endeavor to provide accurate and timely information and use sources we consider reliable, there can be no guarantee that such information is accurate as of the date it is received or that it will continue to be accurate in the future. No one should act on such information without appropriate professional advice after a thorough examination of the particular situation.

Terms of Use

The contents herein may not be reproduced, reused, reprinted or redistributed without the expressed written consent of Aon, unless otherwise authorized by Aon. To use information contained herein, please write to our team.

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