‘In the workplace, in the home, in public services – our Labour government is transforming women’s lives’

Last week, at a meeting of the Women’s Parliamentary Labour Party, Chancellor Rachel Reeves highlighted the change this Labour Government’s decisions have brought about that are helping improve women’s lives across the country.

Women’s weekly earnings are up by £453 in annual terms, compared to an increase of £395 for men.

The annual average female employment rate is at a record high in the year (to Q1 2026) at 72.3%, meaning there are over 430,000 more women in work since the start of this Parliament.

Furthermore, expanded childcare entitlements for young children are estimated to enable 1.5m women who are already in work to increase their hours.

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This Government has delivered more concrete, structural change for women in under two years than the country has seen in a generation, with actual legislative and policy change that is already reshaping women’s lives.

The structure of the British labour market has been built around assumptions that do not reflect how women work or what women need. The Employment Rights Bill directly challenges those assumptions with the most significant overhaul of workers’ rights in decades.

Day-one unfair dismissal rights remove a two-year qualifying period that had previously left women returning from career breaks, or moving between jobs around childcare, exposed and unprotected.

We have also strengthened redundancy protections for pregnant women and new mothers, closing loopholes that employers have exploited for years. By making flexible working the default we have fundamentally shifted the power dynamic in workplaces that have often treated women’s working patterns as an inconvenience.

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The uprating of the National Living Wage has a direct benefit for women, who make up the majority of workers in low-paid sectors such as retail, hospitality and social care. Every increase in the wage floor is, in practice, a pay rise skewed towards women.

Childcare costs have long priced women out of the workforce, that’s why our offer of 30 hours free childcare directly improves women’s ability to work and earn.

More broadly, reforms to the carer’s allowance earnings threshold recognises that the majority of unpaid carers are women and addresses a poverty trap that has penalised women for doing work that holds families and communities together.

Labour’s target of halving violence against women and girls within a decade is backed with concrete measures. The decisions to embed domestic abuse specialists in GP surgeries and A&E departments will enable social services and the police to identify more cases of domestic abuse and allow them to intervene faster. Women in abusive situations often reach healthcare before they reach the police, if they reach the police at all. Meeting them where they are, rather than expecting them to navigate a system designed around reporting, is a meaningful shift in approach.

Our economy, healthcare system, labour market and institutional structures have discriminated against women for generations, and rebalancing that is long overdue. We have much work to do, but this Labour government has done more in the last two years than the previous government did in 14 years.

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