Gender pay gap action plans: why visibility and strategic confidence are key to success

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Gender pay gap action plans. Early in my career as a business journalist, I noticed something odd.

If you looked at the guests we booked for TV and radio business programmes, you could be forgiven for thinking women did not work in business at all.

The contributors were overwhelmingly male. Male chief executives, male finance directors, male marketing directors, male authors, male experts. My little black book of contacts was full of them. And I remember thinking, surely there are women in business. Where are they?

At the time, I drew the wrong conclusion. I assumed maybe women just did not like doing this sort of thing. Maybe they were less interested. Maybe they did not want to put themselves forward.

Of course, that was not the truth. The truth was far more revealing. Women were there. They just were not visible. And if you cannot see someone, it becomes surprisingly easy to leave them out of the room when it matters.

1. The gender pay gap is rarely about pay

The gender pay gap is often talked about as a numbers problem. And the numbers do matter. But from where I stand — having spent years as a business journalist, and the last twelve years working with organisations on this — the gap is rarely just about pay.

It is about what happens to women as they move through organisations. Whether they are seen. Whether they are backed. Whether the environment around them quietly signals that they belong at the top, or subtly suggests they do not.

That is what this article is about. Not just what the new reporting requirements ask of employers, but what action on the gender pay gap actually looks like in practice — and why some of the most important levers are ones that do not always show up in a policy document.

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The gender pay gap is rarely about pay

Why do employers need action plans for women’s career progression, not just gender pay gap reporting?

How do I take action on the gender pay gap? Start by making women more visible

Gender pay gap action: Why women often get stuck or leave at middle management level

How to spot the warning signs before women leave middle management

Women are less likely to be marked out as future stars and miss out on development long before promotion decisions are made

Why waiting for women to put themselves forward is not a strategy

How flexible working and job design can quietly shape who progresses

How to help women communicate with more authority, impact and visibility at work

Communication and confidence are connected, but they are not the same thing

Pay gap success: The impact, influence and confidence programme

Why confidence at work is a skill employers can help build - not a flaw women need to fix

What leaders can do right now to take action on the gender pay gap

Continues:

Bit Famous works with businesses and organisations
to help them communicate with confidence.

By Penny Haslam

MD and Founder - Bit Famous

Workplace Confidence

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2. Why do employers need action plans for women’s career progression, not just gender pay gap reporting?

If you have not been keeping up with this area, here is what you need to know.

For years, large UK employers have had to publish their gender pay gap figures. That has meant reporting the numbers each year on their own website and on the government website too.

What has been missing is any real expectation that employers spell out what they are actually doing to close the gap.

That is the shift.

Gender pay gap reporting: what’s actually changed?

From April 2026, large employers with 250 or more employees are being encouraged to publish action plans showing what they are doing to close their gender pay gap and support employees experiencing menopause. The expectation is that this becomes mandatory from spring 2027, subject to further legislation.

In other words, the conversation is starting to move on from:

What is your gender pay gap?
to:

What are you doing about it?

The government guidance sets out a number of action areas employers can focus on, including:

Recruiting staff

Developing and promoting staff

Building diversity into the organisation

Increasing transparency

Menopause support

The part that interests me most is developing and promoting staff.

That matters because the gap is rarely just about pay. It is about who progresses, who gets promoted, who is helped to build a profile, and who ends up in the better-paid roles in the first place.

It is also worth being clear about the language here, because two terms are constantly confused. The gender pay gap and equal pay are not the same thing. Equal pay is a legal right — men and women doing the same job must be paid the same. The gender pay gap is different.

It is the difference in average earnings between men and women across an organisation. You can be fully compliant on equal pay and still have a significant gender pay gap, because your senior roles are dominated by men and your lower-paid roles are dominated by women. That is the structural problem the new reporting requirements are trying to surface.

So while this change may sound procedural, it points to something much bigger. Employers are being nudged to move beyond reporting and start showing their work.

And that raises some useful questions.

Are you taking action that might genuinely shift things?
Or are you reaching for the safest, neatest response and hoping that will do?

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3. How do I take action on the gender pay gap? Start by making women more visible

If you want to shift the gender pay gap, one of the most useful places to begin is visibility.

I do not mean pushing people to become louder or more self-promotional. I mean something simpler than that. Who is seen? Who is known? Who gets talked about when a good opportunity comes up?

In many organisations, women are doing strong work, but not always in the places where a profile gets built. They are less likely to be put forward for the stretching project, the senior meeting, the presentation, the external event, or the client conversation that matters. And over time, that has consequences.

Because women’s careers are not built on good work alone. They are built on the idea that good work is noticed.

If women are not visible in the moments that shape reputation, they are more easily overlooked when promotion decisions are made. Men stay visible, so they keep getting seen as the natural fit for leadership.

Women look less ready — not because they lack ability, but because they have had fewer chances to demonstrate it.

That is why visibility matters.

If I were leading a business or working in HR on this issue, I would be asking questions like these:

Who gets put forward for high-profile opportunities?

Who presents to senior leaders?

Who is invited into the rooms where decisions are made?

Who gets exposure beyond their immediate team?

Who is seen as one to watch?

Those questions reveal a lot.

They show whether visibility is being shared fairly or whether the same people keep getting the same chances. And they help you spot talented women who are doing strong work without ever quite building the profile that would help them move forward.

So before you rush into writing an action plan on gender pay, I would start here. Look at who is visible in your organisation and who is not. Look at who gets backed, and who gets quietly passed over.

Because if women are not being seen, it becomes much harder for them to move forward. And if they do not move forward, the gap does not close.

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4. Gender pay gap action: Why women often get stuck or leave at middle management level

The gender pay gap is not just about what women are paid. It is about what happens to women as they move through organisations — and there is a particular moment when much of the damage is done.

One of the patterns I see again and again is women reaching the middle of their careers and starting to question whether they want to keep going. Not because they lack ambition or capability. But because something starts to shift around them.

They are often in that squeezed middle, with pressure from above and from the teams around them. They are expected to deliver, cope, and keep everything moving. And at the same time, they may be looking up and wondering whether the next level is really for them.

It might be workload, or culture, or simply the feeling that other people seem to be moving ahead more naturally — with less effort and less friction.

For some women, there is also the specific and often underacknowledged challenge of menopause. Symptoms can affect concentration, sleep, confidence and energy — and if an organisation has no support in place, women navigating this may find their performance quietly suffers at exactly the point in their career when they should be moving into more senior roles. That is a direct contribution to the gender pay gap, and it is now explicitly included in the government’s guidance on the action plans that should cover it.

I have seen this up close. Women who arrived at an organisation with real ambition and energy, who were doing strong work, but who had started to disengage. Not because they had stopped caring, but because the environment had gradually stopped signalling that it did.

Recently, I worked with one group of senior women at a bank who described exactly this. They had not lost their ambition. They had lost confidence that the organisation valued it. The two things can look very similar from the outside, but they call for completely different responses. One is a personal issue. The other is an organisational one.

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5. How to spot the warning signs before women leave middle management

When women leave at this point or decide to stop pushing for the next role, it has a direct effect on the leadership pipeline. You do not just lose one person. You lose future senior women, future role models — the people who might have helped shift the balance at the top.

And often the signs were there all along.

A woman who feels isolated, doing good work but getting little encouragement. Carrying a lot, but not building much profile. Quietly starting to wonder whether it is worth the effort.

This is why I do not think organisations can solve the gender pay gap by focusing solely on pay.

You have to look at what is happening earlier than that.

Are women being developed at this stage of their career, given real reasons to stay, and shown that leadership is realistic and reachable? Or are they left to battle through on their own, in environments that keep sending the same quiet message — that the next rung up was not really built with them in mind?

If you want more women in senior roles, this is one of the moments that matters most.

Because this is where a lot of the future pipeline starts to thin out.

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6. Women are less likely to be marked out as future stars and miss out on development long before promotion decisions are made

Some of the biggest problems sit in the gaps between what an organisation says it believes and what people actually experience as they try to build a career there.

One thing I have noticed is that women are not always short of ability. They are often short of focused development at the right moment.

In many organisations, there is a lot of energy around the people already marked out as stars. But there is also a much bigger group sitting just outside that — people doing solid, valuable work with real potential, who are not being developed in a deliberate enough way.

That matters. By the time promotion conversations occur, much of the groundwork has already been laid. Somebody has had more stretching opportunities. Somebody has had more support. Somebody has been helped to sharpen how they come across, how they land their value, how they handle pressure, and how they speak with authority.

And somebody else has just been left to get on with it.

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7. Why waiting for women to put themselves forward is not a strategy

Another problem is that organisations can be too passive.

There is often an unspoken assumption that talented people will naturally step forward, ask for more and make their ambitions known. Some do. Plenty do not.

That does not mean they are not ambitious. It may mean they are reading the room, weighing up whether the effort will be recognised, or waiting for someone to help them see a route through.

If leaders sit back and wait for women to nominate themselves, apply for everything and push their way in, they may miss a lot of good people.

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8. How flexible working and job design can quietly shape who progresses

Some barriers are built into the shape of work itself.

Start with how roles are advertised. Most job adverts still do not mention that a role could be done flexibly or part-time. That is a significant omission. For many people — disproportionately women — seeing no mention of flexibility is enough to rule themselves out before they have even applied. A small change to how a role is written and advertised can meaningfully affect who comes forward for it.

A more senior role may look possible on paper, but if it is still designed around rigid assumptions about time, presence or availability, many women will take one look at it and decide it is not for them.

That decision may never be voiced. It may never show up in your data in any clear way. But it still affects who pursues opportunities and who, often very pragmatically, decides to stop aiming for the next rung.

This is where organisations need to be more honest with themselves. If progression only feels realistic for people with a certain kind of life, a certain kind of freedom or a certain amount of support around them, then the pathway is narrower than it looks.

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9. How to help women communicate with more authority, impact and visibility at work

If you want to close the gender pay gap, you need more women progressing into better-paid senior roles. And one of the most practical things you can do to help that happen is to develop how women communicate in the moments that shape progression.

This is not about asking women to be louder or more assertive. It is about something more specific than that. Can they hold their own in a meeting with senior leaders? Can they handle a difficult question without losing their thread? Can they articulate the value of their work concisely and with authority? Can they advocate for their team in the rooms where decisions get made?

These are learnable skills. And in many organisations, they are skills that mid-level women are simply not being given enough support to develop.

I have seen what happens when that support is missing. Women are doing excellent work, but are unable to land it with the people who matter. Shrinking in the meetings where they should be expanding. Quietly deciding the effort is not worth it, and leaving organisations that never really understood what they were losing.

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10. Communication and confidence are connected, but they are not the same thing

Alongside communication, confidence is one of the two things I hear about most when I work with organisations on this.

Leaders sometimes say to me, almost wringing their hands, that the women on their teams just lack confidence. And I understand why it can look that way. But I think it is too easy to stop the story there.

Confidence does not exist in isolation. It is shaped by whether you are backed, whether someone spots something in you, whether your contribution is recognised, and whether you can see that the effort leads somewhere worthwhile. When those things are missing, confidence takes a knock — not because of something inherent to the person, but because of what the environment has been quietly communicating.

So when women appear hesitant or slower to push for the next role, the more useful question is not what is wrong with them. It is what this organisation has been doing, or not doing, that might have led to that.

The two things — communication capability and confidence — are distinct, but they reinforce each other. When someone learns to communicate with more impact, their confidence tends to grow. When their confidence grows, they communicate more effectively. That is a cycle worth investing in.

And there is now evidence that targeted interventions on both actually work — and that the results last.

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11. The impact, influence and confidence programme

A good example is a programme we created for a small cohort of senior women at Shawbrook Bank.

It’s called the Impact Influence and Confidence programme, which earned Bit Famous a finalist spot in the Personnel Today Awards.

The Shawbrook Bank HR director had noticed that something was off. These were talented future leaders, but they were experiencing anxiety, low mood, self-doubt and burnout. They had joined the bank with real ambition and energy, but that had dialled down to the point where some were thinking of leaving.

That is exactly the kind of thing employers need to pay attention to if they are serious about the gender pay gap. Because when women at this level start to lose heart, hold back, or walk away, the leadership pipeline thins out, and the better-paid roles remain dominated by the same people.

The programme's focus was communication and confidence.

On the communication side, I helped them have more impact in meetings and presentations, especially in those moments when the pressure felt higher - presenting to senior leadership, handling challenges, dealing with awkward questions and navigating organisational politics. We worked on articulating their value more clearly, being more concise, and advocating for their team and their work with greater gravity, authority, and brevity.

That kind of development matters because when people communicate more effectively, they look sharper and sound sharper. And that means they are more likely to be seen as credible, noticed, and considered for the talent pipeline.

That is not superficial. It affects progression. And progression affects pay.

What also mattered was the connection between the women. They worked in different parts of the bank, but they shared many of the same ambitions and struggles with confidence and communication. And when they started talking openly, something shifted.

There is a phenomenon psychologists call pluralistic ignorance — the tendency to assume that everyone else is coping fine and that you are the only one struggling. It is remarkably common in workplaces, and it can be quietly corrosive. People sit in meetings feeling like the only one who does not quite belong there, not realising that several others around the table feel exactly the same.

When the women in this cohort began to share their experiences — the self-doubt, the imposter feelings, the negative self-talk — they realised they were not alone. That realisation alone was significant. It shifted how they saw themselves and each other, and gave them permission to take their own development more seriously.

The results were striking. They felt more confident. They were better able to bounce back from challenges. They stayed with the bank. Four of the six were promoted within a year, and the remaining two were promoted within two years.

For me, that is a very practical example of what action on the gender pay gap can look like.

Not another abstract statement. Not another set of good intentions.

But targeted support that helps women communicate with more impact, feel more confident in senior spaces and move forward into the roles that ultimately shape the figures.

Testimonial

“The Impact, Influence and Confidence Programme delivered by Bit Famous has been a remarkable success story that's reinforced our commitment to see women leaders fulfil their true potential.

“In terms of ROI, I would estimate the programme has created a cost saving in excess of 10x the investment, both in productivity gains as well as cost avoidance in terms of business continuity and recruitment fees through retention.

Debbie Griffin, Chief People & Marketing Officer, Shawbrook Bank

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12. Why confidence at work is a skill employers can help build - not a flaw women need to fix

Confidence is a workplace skill that can be developed — We have the evidence to prove this.

In 2025, I commissioned a study with the Organisational Psychology Department at Northumbria University, in collaboration with the College of Policing, to examine the impact of our Workplace Confidence training. We followed a group of 500 police officers and civilian police staff in England and Wales, measuring their confidence before the training, immediately afterwards, and three months later.

What struck me most was not that people felt more confident after the training. You would expect that. It was that the shift lasted.

Read the findings: Measuring Workplace Confidence – What happens when you teach self-belief?

Confidence scores rose by 12% and were still higher three months later. Before the session, just 16% of participants felt able to challenge their own limiting self-beliefs. Afterwards, that rose to 89%.

That matters because confidence did not grow through vague encouragement or being told to believe in themselves. It grew because people were shown practical tools to understand how confidence works and what to do when self-doubt kicks in.

They learned how to spot negative self-talk and interrupt it. They learned simple methods they could actually remember and use in real moments. In meetings. In conversations. In decisions that mattered.

And that is the point.

Confidence is not some mystical quality that only a lucky few possess. It can be developed in practical ways that change how people show up at work.

For employers thinking about the gender pay gap, that matters because confidence affects progression.

If someone is second-guessing themselves all the time, they may be less likely to apply for the next role, less likely to speak up in senior spaces, less likely to put themselves forward for visible opportunities and less likely to back themselves when it counts.

Not because they are weak. Not because they are not ambitious. But because confidence has taken a knock.

The answer is not to blame women for that. The answer is to take confidence seriously as part of the working environment and part of career development.

The Northumbria study also found that job satisfaction rose by 14%, and that people felt better able to build trust and confidence in their teams after the training. So this is not just about how one person feels. It affects how people work, how they support others and how they stay in the organisation.

If employers want more women to progress into better-paid senior roles, they need to stop treating confidence as a private flaw and start seeing it as something workplaces can either strengthen or slowly erode.

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13. What leaders can do right now to take action on the gender pay gap

None of this sits with HR alone. And it does not sit with women alone either.

The power of it is in everyone’s hands, but especially leaders and managers.

Because for all the value of programmes, policies and action plans, a huge amount comes down to what happens day to day in the relationship between a manager and their team. Whether someone is encouraged or overlooked. Whether their potential is spotted. Whether they are helped to grow, or simply left to get on with it.

I have worked with senior leaders who genuinely wanted to develop their people, but had fallen into the habit of solving every problem for them. It is easy to do, especially when you have years of experience and the answers come quickly. But that is not the same as development.

Development takes more time than that. It takes patience. It takes listening. It means helping people reach their own conclusions, so they build confidence in their own judgement and feel proud of what they are capable of.

Those moments may seem small, but they matter.

So if you are a leader reading this, the question is not only what your organisation is saying about the gender pay gap. It is what you are doing to help women progress. Are you backing them? Are you encouraging them? Are you helping them build the confidence and communication skills that will move their careers on? Are you filling the pipeline, or assuming someone else will do it?

The gender pay gap will not close through good intentions or tidy action plans alone. It will close when more women are developed, supported and promoted into the better-paid roles that shape the numbers.

And a big part of that starts with leaders doing their job properly: helping their people flourish.

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