Today's workforce is much more diverse than 80 years ago. However, there is still much further to go. Ethnicity, disability and gender employment gaps are endemic in the UK labour market. The gap between the employment rates of lone parents and the general population, for example, is amongst the largest in Europe (Romei & Conboye 2019). Analysis from the Trades Union Congress (TUC 2020) shows that disabled people had an employment rate of 54 per cent, compared to 82 per cent for non-disabled people. High levels of “hidden unemployment” among those with disabilities and long-term health conditions represent the exclusion of many disabled people from work (Beatty & Fothergill 2005). Women, young people and other disadvantaged groups are being hardest hit by the economic fall-out induced by the Covid-19 pandemic (Evans & Dromey 2020).

Certain demographic groups including women and disabled people are also over-represented in poor quality, low-paid work. In 2020 disabled workers earned £2.10 an hour (19.6 per cent) less than non-disabled workers (TUC 2020). This is due in part to the greater likelihood of both lone parents and disabled people to work part-time, in the case of mothers typically due to the need to balance work with caring responsibilities (Ray et al. 2014).

In the UK there is a significant part-time pay penalty that is not observed to the same extent everywhere. Here, part-time workers are concentrated in lower paid manual, elementary and service occupations, whereas in countries such as Germany and the Netherlands, part-time work is more available across the occupational structure, with a higher proportion of better paying part-time roles (Warren 2008). This has been argued to result from relatively weak regulation in the UK, which does not have as much protection for short-time workers compared to other countries (Ray et al. 2014). Tackling gender pay gaps has moved up the agenda in recent years, with the introduction of mandatory reporting. The TUC and others are now calling for ethnicity pay gap reporting.