A UK charity called Pregnant Then Screwed has launched a campaign called “Thanks for your service*” that turns the pension gap into a retail clearance display. Giant neon “33% OFF” starburst labels, the kind you would see on a marked-down product in a shop window, were placed on women across billboards, print, and social media. Outdoor placements ran across seven UK cities.
The number behind it
Women’s pension pots are on average 33% smaller than men’s. The gap is not a product of lower wages alone. Career breaks taken for childcare, reduced working hours, and part-time arrangements during child-rearing years eat directly into pension contributions over decades. A woman who takes two or three years out of full-time work to raise children loses not just the salary during that period but the compounding pension contributions that would have accumulated across 30 or 40 years of retirement savings. By the time she retires, that shortfall has grown substantially larger than the original break in contributions would suggest.
The execution
The campaign borrowed the visual language of a clearance sale and applied it to people. The sticker format, bright, circular, and attention-stopping, is one of the most recognisable shortcuts in consumer retail. Slapping it on a woman in a billboard context reframes the pension gap not as a systemic failure that takes decades to notice, but as something that has been priced in from the start. The “33% OFF” label does not require explanation. Anyone who has walked past a sale window understands immediately what it means to be marked down. Hundreds of women were featured across the campaign’s imagery, with outdoor placements running simultaneously in seven cities to make the scale of the issue visible at street level.
Creative director Gemma Phillips described the core problem the campaign was trying to make legible: “Women are being devalued by the pension system every day, we just don’t see it happening.”
Rachel Grocott, CEO of Pregnant Then Screwed, framed the wider argument: “This campaign shines a light on how the motherhood penalty plays out across a woman’s lifetime.”
The campaign was supported by Anna Whitehouse, Ashley James, and Caroline Hirons. Photography was handled by Sane Seven, with design by Rachel Many.
The wider context
Pregnant Then Screwed has built its campaign work around making abstract discrimination tangible. Its previous campaign, Career Shredder, placed a giant CV shredder in a public location to represent how pregnancy and maternity discrimination removes women from the workforce. That campaign made the act of losing a career visible as a physical event. “Thanks for your service*” follows the same logic but extends it into the longer financial consequence of those interruptions. If Career Shredder showed the moment a woman’s career is cut short, this campaign shows what she is left with 30 years later.
The asterisk in the tagline “Thanks for your service*” carries the weight of the idea. It signals a footnote, a condition buried in fine print, the kind of caveat that companies attach to offers that are not quite what they appear. Applied to the phrase that typically accompanies recognition of service, it reframes the social contract around caregiving as a transaction with hidden terms. Women contribute unpaid labour to child-rearing, take career breaks in service of family, and arrive at retirement to find the pension system has recorded all of it as a discount applied to their own financial security.
Campaign Name: “Thanks for your service*”
Agency Name: Not mentioned
Brand Name: Pregnant Then Screwed
Location: United Kingdom (seven cities)
