Your organisation is likely spending hundreds of thousands every year on benefits your employees aren’t using. Pension contributions going unreviewed or not even used, opted out of at the first chance, wellbeing resources sitting unopened and some of your best people undervaluing themselves and eventually leaving for somewhere that offers them a few thousand pounds more.
And the bonus is, you don’t need to add more to the benefits package. The problem isn’t a lack of provision. It’s a financial confidence issue. And it’s most concentrated in one group: the women in your workforce.
She’s been with you for seven years. She hits her targets, she mentors others and right now, she has benefits sitting in a portal she hasn’t opened since she joined, and a pension she enrolled in at the default rate and has never reviewed. It feels important to sort, she knows that, but somehow it never quite makes it to the top of the list. That’s not laziness. That’s avoidance. And it’s far more common than most organisations realise.
This is the version of the women and money conversation that gender pay gap reporting doesn’t reach. The talent you’re undervaluing. The resources you’re funding that nobody is using. And the recruitment fees and lost knowledge that will follow when she eventually leaves. And it is one of the reasons your gender pay gap doesn’t close, even when your policies say it should.
This isn’t about how much women earn
Most conversations about women and money in the workplace start and stop at the pay gap. And yes, the pay gap matters, it really does. The fact that women earn less across their careers, build smaller pension pots, and carry greater financial risk from career breaks is real and significant.
But beneath that is something less visible and far more influential: financial confidence.
This is one of the hidden drivers of your gender pay gap. Not just what you pay women, but what they feel able to ask for, negotiate, and hold. This shapes how women engage with pay, pensions and long-term financial decisions.
And while it may feel personal, it is absolutely commercial.
It shows up in:
- distracted employees who aren’t fully present at work, with stress and lack of sleep
- higher absence and associated costs
- increased pressure on managers to handle financial concerns they aren’t equipped for
- lower engagement with benefits you are already funding
- avoidable turnover and repeated recruitment cycles
This isn’t just a wellbeing issue, it relates to performance, retention and cost.
And it doesn’t only affect women on lower salaries. Some of the women I work with are earning really well and still feel financially out of control. More income doesn’t fix a confidence problem. It often just widens the gap between how things look externally and how they feel internally.
Research consistently shows that women are more likely to underestimate their own financial knowledge, even when that knowledge is strong. They are more likely to defer financial decisions, avoid financial conversations, or assume that the pension, the investment, the pay negotiation, is something for someone else to deal with. The fear of asking for support can keep them stuck.
That doesn’t come from nowhere. It comes from years of being told, directly or indirectly, that money is someone else’s domain, from households where money was managed by someone else, from schools that never covered personal finance, from a financial services industry that hasn’t spoken to or represented women. By the time those women are sitting in your workforce, the belief that finance isn’t really for them can be deeply ingrained.
And it shows up directly in how they engage, or don’t, with everything you already offer them.
Why most financial wellbeing support misses women entirely
When I start working with organisations, I consistently see the same thing: the financial wellbeing provision is already there. The portal exists. The EAP has a money section. There might even be a webinar series.
And the women in the workforce aren’t using it.
Because it wasn’t built with them in mind. They tell themselves they don’t have the time or that they won’t understand it.
Most financial wellbeing content is designed to inform.
Here’s how a pension works, here’s a budgeting template, here’s a video about ISAs.
And information, on its own, does almost nothing for someone whose core barrier isn’t knowledge, it’s confidence, shame, and a deeply held belief that getting on top of their finances is something they’ll get around to eventually, when they feel ready, when it feels less overwhelming.
Life doesn’t calm down. It just changes shape. And eventually becomes never. And in the meantime, your organisation continues to absorb the cost.
What works is starting where people actually are. That means:
- acknowledging the emotional side of money, not just the practical
- creating space where people can admit what they don’t know without judgement
- and keeping things simple enough that it actually gets done.
And critically, it means moving beyond one-off sessions. Programmes that run over a period of time work better than one-off sessions for exactly this reason, the initial motivation is just the starting point. The real work, and the real results, come from what happens after that.
From an organisational perspective, that shows up as:
- higher engagement with pensions and benefits
- reduced presenteeism and stress-related absence
- fewer reactive, panic-driven pay conversations
- stronger retention of experienced employees
This is not about replacing pay strategies. It’s about making them more effective.
If you’re seeing this in your organisation and want to understand what structured support could look like, I’d love to talk. You can find my listing and reach out here: https://expertservicesdirectory.com/directory/debbie-bailey
Why I do this work (and how it impacts organisations positively)
I remember the first time I wanted to ask for a pay rise. I had no idea where to start.
Not just how to ask. I didn’t even know asking was something people did.
Nobody in my world had ever negotiated a salary. So when I stepped into corporate environments where that was expected, I had no reference point. I didn’t know what was reasonable, what I was worth, or how to approach it.
My parents were in low-paid jobs where salary wasn’t up for negotiation. By the time I was in corporate roles, I was earning more than both of them combined and that felt really uncomfortable. I didn’t know what those roles should earn or if I was entitled to more. And when I finally did raise it and was told I’d already had a 10% increase, I went quiet. I had no reference point, no language for it and no confidence that I had the right to push back. I ended up in senior roles, significantly underpaid.
I also opted out of my pension when I first started working. I was fresh out of university, on low pay, and genuinely couldn’t see how I could afford it. It was my dad’s persistence, he kept at me until I opted back in. I was lucky. I know plenty of women who weren’t.
That’s the version of this story that doesn’t show up in gender pay gap reports. The woman who didn’t push for the salary she deserved because she didn’t know she could. The woman who deprioritised her pension because nobody had ever shown her why it mattered at 22, not 52. The woman who had all the capability and none of the financial confidence to act on it.
Avoiding it feels safer. But it only protects the fear, not the future.
I went on to spend years in FTSE 100 finance teams, and I saw the same patterns there, just better disguised. Highly capable people managing multi-million-pound budgets who, in their own financial lives, were deferring, avoiding, and struggling, while not asking for help. They didn’t lack the intelligence, it was that the confidence, the context, and the tools had just never been there.
More information isn’t the answer. It’s a confidence and behaviour problem. And you can’t solve it with a financial blog or a link to a money comparison website.
April is the right moment to have this conversation
For most organisations, April means gender pay gap reporting. And while the numbers matter, they can also create a false sense of closure, as if publishing the data is the action.
It isn’t. The data describes the gap but it doesn’t address what’s actually driving it.
The women in your workforce who aren’t engaging with their pensions, aren’t using the benefits on offer, aren’t advocating for their own development, they’re not passive because they don’t care. They’re disengaged because the financial confidence that would drive that engagement was never built. Reporting the gap without doing anything about it changes nothing for the women in your building.
If your organisation is already looking at the numbers, this is the moment to go further. To ask not just “what does our pay gap look like?” but “what is the actual financial experience of the women who work here and what are we doing to change it?”
What working with me looks like
I am a Chartered Management Accountant and Certified Financial Coach, which means I understand both the commercial reality of what financial stress costs an organisation and the behavioural reality of why people struggle to change their relationship with money. I understand this from both sides.
I work with HR and People teams to deliver financial wellbeing programmes that are practical, engaging, and built around actually changing how people think and act around money, not just telling them what to do.
That includes:
- targeted workshops on financial confidence, budgeting and future planning
- group coaching programmes that support change over time
- Lunch and Learn sessions that engage without overwhelming
- leadership sessions to help managers confidently support financially stressed employees
Everything is tailored to your workforce. No jargon, no judgement, just practical support people can use immediately.
This isn’t another webinar people forget. It’s structured, behaviour-led support that changes how people make financial decisions over time.
One recent employer said: “The attendees had never really encountered money mindset before, but Debbie made the idea accessible. The session was brilliantly interactive and powerful.”
The results organisations typically see include higher pension participation, fewer last-minute pay requests, reduced reliance on reactive salary increases, reduced presenteeism, fewer stress-driven absences. When people feel in control of their money, a pay rise isn’t always necessary to feel secure.
If you are responsible for people, wellbeing or culture and are ready to do something that genuinely reaches the women in your workforce, I would love to talk.
You can find my listing and get in touch here: https://expertservicesdirectory.com/directory/debbie-bailey
A question worth raising in your next people meeting
If you stripped away every financial wellbeing resource your organisation currently offers and asked honestly, who is it actually designed for? Would women at every level of your organisation be included? Or are you relying on provision that works for some, and misses others entirely?
The organisations that get this right don’t just see better benefit engagement and stronger pension participation. They see women who feel genuinely seen and supported, and who respond with the focus, retention, and performance that comes from not carrying invisible financial weight into every working day.
This is costing you more than any report is showing you. It just isn’t being measured properly. The good news is it’s also one of the most straightforward things to address, when the support is designed correctly.
Reach me directly through my listing here: https://expertservicesdirectory.com/directory/debbie-bailey
