January 2026 — Women Leading the Way Digest: Pay Gaps, Pensions Reform, and What WEF Signals

As 2025 closed and 2026 started picking up pace, the women-in-finance agenda began to look less like a values statement and more of a scorecard. January showed a visible split between markets that embed inclusion into targets, reporting, and governance routines, and those that still treat it as a narrative for headlines.

In the UK, the latest Women in Finance Charter update emphasises that progress is expected to be comparable, with firms mainly judged on what they measure and disclose. On the other side of the planet in Davos, the framing switched to women’s networks as resilience infrastructure in uncertain markets.

In other words, 2026 opens with what the sector has long been waiting for: gaps are harder to hide, and progress has to be demonstrated with numbers, rather than declarations.

The Women in Finance Charter as the UK progress update

HM Treasury published its annual Women in Finance Charter progress update on 29 January 2026. It’s a departmental report card covering targets, gender pay gap context, and the internal programmes Treasury uses to build and retain senior female talent.

The Treasury says it has met its 50% target for female representation in the Senior Civil Service. It reports 51% female representation in senior management as of March 2025, up from 43% when it signed the Charter in March 2016. It also notes that 53.9% of Executive Management Board positions are held by women.

Practically, that means reporting now works as a credibility filter. If a firm can’t show the baseline, the target, and the mechanism that moves the number, the market will treat the commitment as branding.

Boardroom pay gap — diversity up, parity behind

EY’s January 2026 Boardroom Monitor says the UK’s board pay gap fell from 40% in 2020 to 29% over the last five years. In several other markets, the gap got wider.

In contrast, Bloomberg adds that Europe’s finance board pay gap is now the worst in six years. It says women on boards earned about 62% of what men earned in 2024, down from 65% in 2023.

So, the key takeaways are the following:

• Representation is not the finish line. A board can look more balanced, while pay still shows who holds the highest-value roles.

• Pay is a proxy for power. If women earn less at the same level, it often means they are less likely to hold chair roles or top committee roles.

• The “pipeline” explanation is weaker at a board level. When women are already in power, the question becomes how roles, influence, and rewards are allocated.

The pensions gap is a design problem

A new report from the Edinburgh Futures Institute, supported by Evelyn Partners, looks at why the gender pensions gap persists. It points to concrete constraints — time scarcity, career breaks, and the way pension systems and financial advice are designed — and argues that policy and guidance need to adjust.

That’s why the report frames “women and wealth” as a product and policy issue. If the system is built for uninterrupted careers and close attention, it will keep rewarding people who can give time to long-term planning. In turn, it will also penalise those who can’t — so the gap stays baked in.

We believe that a useful way to read this is through “friction.” So, each extra form, wrong choice, or poorly timed prompt increases drop-off. Over the years, small drop-offs compound into real wealth gaps.

Women’s finance networks framed as resilience infrastructure

A January World Economic Forum piece presents Women in Finance communities as strategic assets in volatile, fragmented markets. By doing so, it supports resilience, growth, and innovation through faster learning and stronger decision-making. Also, it treats trusted networks as a business mechanism, instead of just a visibility layer.

The implication is that these communities sit closer to operational resilience than to representation narratives. Their value is that they help leaders compare signals, pressure-test choices, and preserve organisational memory as cycles shorten and turnover rises.

Another layer worth looking at is that networks can reduce isolation at senior levels, where many decisions are made with limited feedback. A strong peer circle makes it easier to sanity-check assumptions, spot risks earlier, and avoid repeating failures other firms already lived through. Over time, that creates better judgment under stress and faster spread of workable playbooks.

Conclusion

Taken together, January’s threads let us assume that the women-in-finance agenda is entering a more demanding phase.

Progress is becoming harder to “storytell” without data behind it, while gaps are easier to spot once reporting gets consistent. At the same time, the focus is widening beyond representation toward mechanisms that shape outcomes. All of this means that credibility in 2026 will be earned only through real, provable evidence.

At Drofa Comms, we believe that lasting progress comes from consistent work. So, we’ll keep tracking what’s happening in the field and keep you in the loop. Only in this way can the conversation stay grounded in facts and translate into real change for women in finance.