Well not quite. In fact exactly the opposite. I was looking at the following graph on the Spectator web site.
It shows 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.
Meanwhile last week I had finished (re)reading Freidrich Engels 1845 book The Condition of the Working Class in England.
In it Engels argues that the Irish (rather than Eastern Europeans) are taking all the male jobs, and that industrialisation means that many others are being done by machines tended by women (and children).
Are we males redundant (as my daughters would tend to argue!) or is this yet another cyclical scare?
