The gender gap lands at half the national scheme level, though the ethnicity gap runs wider and has no benchmark to measure it against
Women working for Westminster City Council in central London have built up 81 pence of pension for every £1 accrued by their male colleagues.
That 18.7 percent gender pension gap sits at roughly half the 34.7 percent recorded across the UK's Local Government Pension Scheme (LGPS) as a whole, according to Making pensions exciting: closing the diversity pension gap in the LGPS, published by Investors for Purpose.
The research was co-sponsored by the City of Westminster Pension Fund, Hymans Robertson, and the LGPS Scheme Advisory Board (SAB).
Westminster City Council, acting as a scheme employer within the fund, supplied and enabled access to the anonymized data behind the case study, and Investors for Purpose paired that data with 30 one-to-one interviews of 30 to 45 minutes each.
Members from ethnically diverse backgrounds had accrued 30.3 percent less pension than White members under the career average revalued earnings (CARE) arrangement, the report found, with the equivalent gap at 26.8 percent under the earlier final salary arrangement.
Investors for Purpose recorded a 46 percent gap between men from ethnically diverse backgrounds and White men, against 30.2 percent between the two groups of women.
White men had 4.1 more years of LGPS membership than men from ethnic minority backgrounds, equivalent to 39 percent more service.
The proportion of ethnically diverse employees in the workforce rose from 31 percent in 2013/14 to 47 percent in 2025/26, which the report identifies as a reason many may have had less time to accrue benefits.
Asian women had accrued about 12.7 percent more pension than Asian men and Black women about 3.8 percent more than Black men, while White women had accrued 23.8 percent less than White men.
Asian women averaged 7.2 years of service against 5.9 years for Asian men, the report notes, compared with 8.9 years for White women against 10.5 for White men.
Disabled members had accrued 0.4 percent more than non-disabled members under CARE, the only negative gap among the characteristics examined, although the report records a 12.6 percent gap in the opposite direction under final salary.
Scheme participation stood at 88.2 percent of the workforce, split 88.4 percent for women and 88.1 percent for men.
Generation Z men recorded the lowest participation of any demographic group at 74 percent, with Generation Z women at 81 percent, and Asian men had the lowest rate by ethnicity at 76.4 percent.
The Westminster case study shows a gender pension gap "substantially below the wider LGPS level," Charlotte O'Leary, chief executive of Investors for Purpose, said in the statement announcing the research.
O'Leary said the result shows what employers and schemes can achieve by understanding the issues their members face.
She said in the same statement that an LGPS-wide ethnicity benchmark would let every scheme and employer understand its own position, identify where action is needed, and track progress over time.
Schemes often say the data does not exist, she said, but Westminster "has proven that the data can be gathered, analysed and acted on."
No official scheme-wide LGPS measure of the ethnicity pension gap currently exists, the report states, so the 30.3 percent figure cannot establish whether Westminster performs better or worse than other scheme employers.
Gender alone "is not enough" to explain inequality in pension outcomes, SAB secretary Clair Alcock said in the same announcement.
Alcock urged ministers to extend pension gap reporting to other protected characteristics and to all public service pension schemes.
Interviewees reported that engagement with pensions typically begins in their late forties or early fifties, while younger members prioritize student debt, housing deposits, and living costs.
The report recommends wider disclosure of diversity pension data across the LGPS, communications tailored to life stages such as starting a career or returning from parental leave, and access to one-to-one authorized financial advice for employees in lower pay bands.
