Gender discrimination is illegal in Britain – but tell that to the recession. It has hit male jobs harder than female jobs and in a cover story for this week’s Spectator, Matthew Lynn looks behind it. This has been, he says, a Mancession, where “the jobs lost in the last two years have tended to be ones done by men, whereas the preponderance of new vacancies are in areas of the economy in which women do best.” I asked the ONS for the official figures – and here they are:
They show that, if you count everyone in Britain employed over the age of 16, there has been a 3.9 percent reduction in male jobs and just a 0.8 percent reduction in female jobs. In actual numbers, the recession has (so far) taken 622,000 male jobs and 113,000 female jobs: a ratio of five-to-one.
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