Low number of female breadwinners

Nobody says it out loud, so let the employers say it. In a 2016 government survey of over 3,000 of them, a quarter thought it reasonable to ask a woman at interview about her plans to have children, and 27 per cent said pregnancy put an unreasonable cost on the workplace. Small firms were likeliest to say it. That is a guess about which of the two will take the time off, and it is priced into hiring and pay long before anyone is pregnant. It stays priced because the guess keeps being right. Just 1 per cent of eligible mothers and 5 per cent of eligible fathers use shared parental leave. We run payroll for hundreds of small firms, and after a birth it is the mother's hours we are asked to cut, almost never the father's. Remote work helps, because it lifts the hours a mother can actually do. But the answer is not more shared leave. It is enough of it that an employer cannot tell which one will go.

The number has barely moved in twenty years because the workplace still rewards a specific mould: long hours, constant availability, and presence over output. Those are traits we've traditionally associated with the archetypal male employee, and they quietly penalise anyone who won't play by those rules.

If we want more female breadwinners, we need to standardise the employment experience across sexes. Judge people on results, not visible sacrifice, and treat flexibility as normal rather than a concession. Women shouldn't have to adopt traditionally male characteristics to get ahead; the workplace should stop demanding them.

The deeper problem is that we've created a hierarchy that treats paid work as the serious business of life and childrearing as something that has to fit around it, when raising the next generation is arguably one of the most valuable contributions anyone can make to society.

The breadwinner gap is not an ambition gap; it is the result of an economy that still treats care as primarily a woman’s responsibility. Women are more likely to reduce hours, pause careers or choose flexible roles after having children, while men are still rewarded for uninterrupted progression. Add the gender pay gap, unequal access to senior roles and the cost of childcare, and the slow progress is hardly surprising.

To change the numbers, we need affordable childcare, genuinely shared parental leave, flexible senior roles and employers measuring progression after maternity—not just recruitment. Financial education matters too: women should be encouraged to negotiate pay, invest and build wealth earlier, but the burden cannot sit with women alone. Until workplaces and households share the cost of care more equally, female breadwinners will remain the exception rather than the norm.