This Wednesday we had the honour of presenting as guest speakers at the first international conference on women, war, and economic crisis hosted at the University of Lahore. Our presentation focused on the UK.

As a consequence of recent geopolitical developments and different UK internal shocks, we are facing a cost-of-living crisis. Food prices are rising, energy bills remain volatile, and for many households, wages simply are not keeping up. But the cost-of-living crisis is not gender neutral.

Let me start with how we arrived here. The UK cost-of-living crisis is not the result of a single event, it reflects a sequence of overlapping domestic and global shocks, and to understand it we need to go back to the global financial crisis.

The aftermath of the global financial crisis left the UK with weak productivity growth and prolonged wage stagnation, trends that continue to shape the economy today. This was followed by a decade of austerity, during which many households saw reduced financial resilience, with lower savings and increased reliance on stretched public services.

As a result, households entered the late 2010s in a relatively fragile position. This was joined by two major events in the UK: one in the mid-2010s (the Brexit referendum) and the other at the end of the decade (COVID-19). The Brexit referendum in 2016 introduced further uncertainty through trade frictions, slower investment, and weaker business confidence, reinforcing the pattern of weak growth. This was followed by the COVID-19 pandemic, which disrupted the labour market and household incomes on a large scale.

From 2021 onward, the nature of the shock shifted. Prices began to rise rapidly, driven by disruptions to global supply chains, a rebound in demand after the pandemic, and rising energy costs (IMF, 2022). The Russia–Ukraine conflict further intensified these pressures, particularly through increases in energy and food prices across Europe. More recently, continued instability in energy markets and broader geopolitical tensions, such as the Iran conflict, Middle East tensions, and trade uncertainty, have prolonged this period of economic uncertainty.

One of the clearest features of the current crisis is the gap between essential costs and earnings. In the UK, prices for essentials such as food and housing have increased steadily in recent years. By contrast, real wages have grown much more slowly. This creates a growing gap between what households need to spend and what they earn, and this gap is at the heart of the cost-of-living crisis (IFS, 2023-2025). But we are not just talking about the inflation rate itself, we are talking about the lived consequences of a prolonged period of high prices and uncertainty.

This matters for everyone, but in reality the impact depends on income, job type, and household responsibilities. This is where gender becomes important.

Women are more likely to be in lower-paid and less secure jobs. They are also significantly more likely to work part-time. In the UK, around 70% of part-time workers are women (UK Parliament, 2025; Women’s Budget Group, 2024). Part-time work is often associated with lower pay, lower long-term earnings, and fewer opportunities for career progression, reinforcing income gaps over time (ONS, 2024).

If prices rise quickly, workers with lower and less stable earnings are less able to absorb those shocks. A useful way to think about this is that gender inequality is not only about wages at a point in time, but also about exposure to risk. Women are overrepresented in low-paid and insecure sectors, including care, hospitality, retail, and services (UK Parliament, 2025; Women’s Budget Group, 2024). During periods of economic stress, jobs in these sectors tend to be less stable, meaning women are more exposed to reductions in hours, income, or employment.

So the same macroeconomic shock can translate into very different outcomes depending on where individuals are positioned in the labour market.

But there is a third and crucial factor that we must consider, and this is unpaid care work. In the UK, women perform around 60% more unpaid care work than men (ONS, 2023). They also spend significantly more time on childcare and household tasks (OECD, 2022).

This has direct economic consequences. Time spent on unpaid care reduces the time available for paid work and contributes to women’s higher concentration in part-time employment (UK Parliament, 2025).

Governments have not ignored these issues. A number of policies have aimed, directly or indirectly, to reduce inequality and support households during periods of economic stress.

These include, for example, expansions in childcare provision, increases in the minimum wage, and adjustments to the tax-benefit system targeting low-income households. But the evidence suggests a mixed picture. Some policies have improved labour market participation and provided short-term financial support. However, deeper structural inequalities remain firmly in place.

The gender pay gap persists. Women continue to face a significant “motherhood penalty,” with earnings falling after having children (a pattern well documented in the work of Claudia Goldin, nobel prize 2023, who shows how career interruptions and differences in working hours play a key role in shaping long-term earnings gaps). Part-time work continues to limit long-term earnings and progression. At the same time, unpaid care responsibilities remain highly unequal. If the cost-of-living crisis is amplifying existing inequalities, then policy responses need to address those underlying structures.

This includes reducing the unpaid care burden through more accessible childcare and better-designed parental leave systems. It also means improving job quality, particularly by addressing the pay and progression penalties associated with part-time work.

Targeted income support remains important, especially for low-income households and single parents, who are disproportionately affected. Finally, there is a growing case for more gender-sensitive policy design, ensuring that fiscal and economic policies are assessed not just in aggregate, but in terms of who they affect.

Under the current environment, many countries are increasing expenditure on defence, often at the expense of welfare. Women tend to have a higher reliance on welfare systems, meaning these trade-offs can disproportionately affect them.

Economic shocks and crises are not just about how much prices have increased, but about who has the capacity to absorb those increases.

In the UK today, as in many economies around the world, that capacity is far from evenly distributed.

References:

Institute for Fiscal Studies (2023–2025). Living standards, inflation and inequality analysis. Available at: https://www.ifs.org.uk 

International Monetary Fund (2022). Gendered impact of inflation shocks. Available at: https://www.imf.org 

Office for National Statistics (2023). Unpaid care work statistics. Available at: https://www.ons.gov.uk 

Office for National Statistics (2024). Earnings and labour market data (AWE, CPI). Available at: https://www.ons.gov.uk 

Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (2022). Gender inequality and unpaid care work. Available at: https://www.oecd.org 

UK Parliament (2025). Women and the labour market. House of Commons Library Briefing Paper CBP-9366. Available at: https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/CBP-9366/CBP-9366.pdf 

Women’s Budget Group (2024). Gender and the cost-of-living crisis. Available at: https://wbg.org.uk  

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