4.2 Enhancing your awareness
Recent research
Although sex discrimination is a familiar topic, it is still something that many people experience in the workplace today.
In their 2024 annual survey (Young Women’s Trust, 2024) of nearly 4000 young women aged 18-30 and a comparison group of just over 1000 young men, Young Women’s Trust found that 53% of young women reported discrimination at work or when looking for work, compared with 40% of young men. This has risen from 42% and 38% respectively in the 2022 survey.
In a separate section of the survey, 33% of over 900 HR decision makers questioned, agreed or strongly agreed that sexist behaviour still existed within their organisation.
However, SME Loans (2021) surveyed 2000 employees in the UK on the topic of gender based discrimination, and unexpectedly found that more men (28%) than women (23%) felt they had experienced sex discrimination in the workplace, with women more likely to feel they were not taken seriously because of their gender, and men more likely to feel that women ‘get away with more at work’.
The survey also found differences between age groups:
| Age group | % experiencing gender discrimination at work |
|---|---|
| 18–24 | 28.2 |
| 25–34 | 38.4 |
| 35–44 | 30.4 |
| 45–54 | 17 |
| >55 | 7.5 |
They also found regional variations, with over 34% of the workforce in Yorkshire reporting that they had experienced workplace gender discrimination, compared with 15.6% in Northern Ireland.
Gender gap
Since 2006, the Global Gender Gap index has been measuring the extent of gender based gaps among four key dimensions:
- Economic Participation and Opportunity
- Educational Attainment
- Health and Survival
- Political empowerment
The World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report (2025) projects that the overall global gender gap, which is now 68.8% closed, will reach full parity in 123 years across the 100 countries covered continuously since the first edition of the report.
The Economic Participation and Opportunity gap (the most directly relevant to the workplace), is projected to reach full parity in 135 years. While this is still more than a century away, increased scores across almost every indicator in this category mean it is now 17 years closer than predicted in the 2024 edition of this report.
If you wish to look at the data for a specific country, profiles are provided for each of the 153 participating countries. See References for the link.
UK data
The World Economic Forum’s report also shows that the UK has moved back into the Top 10 rankings, from 14th in 2024, with 83.8% of the gap closed. This is largely due to an increase in the number of women in parliament influencing the Political Empowerment Score. (Plaget and Guo, 2025).
In the October 2024 statistical release from the UK’s Office for National Statistics (Earnings Team, 2024), the gender pay gap among full time employees was 7% (down from 7.5% in 2023). A larger difference was measured in employees aged 40 or over and for higher earners. Data show a slow decline in the gender pay gap over time, falling by approximately a quarter over the last decade for full-time employees.