Now is the time to send the men into the nursery

On Boxing Day, Charles Clarke – perhaps keen to maintain his reputation as the Labour Party's bruiser – came out fighting. This most masculine of politicians chose yesterday to urge others to do what he says, not what he does, and resist gender stereotyping in the workforce.

Not for the first time, the Government is pleading for more men to become involved in professional child care, a sector still utterly dominated by women, who fill 98 per cent of posts. A £4m recruitment campaign by Mr Clarke's Department of Education will try to change that, and ask men to give the idea some serious thought.

A similar, though smaller, campaign last year included a survey of men's attitudes to childcare provision. Two thirds of men believed that children would benefit from more men taking professional care of them, although only one in five agreed that they themselves might consider such work.

Much of this reluctance is cultural, with men still uneasy about the idea of working with small children simply because in their hearts they continue to see it as women's work. Even teaching at primary-school level is seen as a career far more suitable for women. In early-years education the gender gap is even larger.

And while on the one hand society has loosened up a lot in its ideas about how much men should help in the care of small children, in one important aspect it has regressed. Wave upon wave of scandal concerning paedophilia has made men, who are happy enough to change their own children's nappies, being wary of being seen in physical intimacy with other people's children.

The nasty fact is that in the current climate of suspicion a lot of parents are happier to see their own children in the care of women rather than men. Both of these strains of stereotypical thinking are reactionary and unhelpful. But these are by no means the only things that work against men who might otherwise wish for a career in childcare.

A lot of it is purely practical. Women's work has for so long been lowly regarded that its pay and conditions continue to reflect this. It's not just the idea of their own feminisation, or even the suspicion that maybe their intent is not genuine, that men resist – they're not too attracted by the idea of the feminisation of their pay and conditions either. The truth is that for much of the workforce, the reality is hard work with poor pay and conditions, and a high turnover among nursery staff in the massive private sector.

Britain stands alone in Europe in many aspects of childcare. We need it more than the rest of Europe; Britain has the highest rates of child poverty in the European Union; British fathers work longer hours than anywhere else in Europe; and in Britain working mothers are more common.

Despite all that, the cost to British parents of childcare is famously the highest in Europe. Despite the Chancellor's complex, but nevertheless welcome, system of tax credits for nursery care (which has just been extended to cover some childminder care in the home), the fact remains that against a European average of 25 per cent, British parents still foot a whopping 75 per cent of the cost of childcare themselves.

Yet at the same time, Britain is alone in Europe again when it comes to wages for nursery carers. We are the only country that runs a system of two-tier rates for early-years carers, in which those who look after and teach the under-fives can expect to be paid much less than those offering a more formal education to older children.

Again much of this is about attitudes, this time to children rather than women. In Europe, children tend to start formal education later, as early-years education – honing creative, social and motor skills – is valued more. Interestingly, boys particularly are said to benefit from their formal education starting later. Perhaps more time spent on socialising little boys might breed men more willing and able to pass on such skills themselves.

And, indeed, much of the current concern about getting more men involved with young children is focused on role models and their positive effect. There is a real concern about equality here, too, with the strategy underpinned by an ideology that remains committed to somehow freeing both men and women from the sexual inequalities that continue to mark our society.

But when it comes to the crunch, the main impetus behind the recruitment drive among men is again more economic than sociological. Ever since Labour formulated its national childcare strategy, with its ambitious target of creating 1.6 million nursery places, it has been struggling to deliver. A recent study by the Institute of Fiscal Studies suggested that there are still only eight nursery places for every hundred children under five.

Yet this worrying failure of provision comes against a background of day nurseries in Britain becoming the fastest-growing small-business sector, with provision up 42 per cent since 1998. Unfortunately, prices, too, have gone up. With so many people chasing so few places, nursery provision is a seller's market.

What's more, since 90 per cent of Britain's daycare provision is private, the nursery providers tend to go where the money is. Why risk private investment in poor areas, when demand in wealthy areas is so powerful? Looked at in this light, the appeal to men to join the ranks of childcare workers becomes a drive to deliver a dynamic and profitable private enterprise into the hands of more male managers recruiting more female carers. What the country really needs is more nurseries. The appeal to male carers may have been launched under the banner of equality for adults and less gender-specific role models for children, but it's as much about expanding the sector as it is about looking after children.

Labour has its sights set on attracting entrepreneurs as much as carers from the ranks of men, not because it has some sinister agenda in which nursery provision has to be taken over by male management, but because it needs to attract many more people into this growing sector. The trend is towards expanding, corporate nursery chains, big companies and big turnovers.

The hope is that many of the teething troubles experienced in the application of the national childcare strategy can be smoothed out as the sector becomes more competitive. More nurseries means more competition. More competition means more competitive pricing. More competitive pricing means more people attracted back to work. More working parents means more money circulating in the economy.

And there is still loads of room for huge expansion. A survey last year suggested that 61 per cent of single mothers didn't work – with Gordon Brown's tax credits continuing to disappoint the Government in their inability to make much of a dent in these figures. And surprisingly, since the idea of the working superwoman dominates the agenda so much, only 28 per cent of mothers with partners work full time – although another 37 per cent hold down a part-time position.

The only trouble is that none of this concerns itself with anything beyond the idea that work is good for us. Gender equality may be a fine thing, and so might more men involving themselves with small children. But these, despite the rhetoric, are byproducts of Mr Clarke's initiative, when instead they should be central to it.

d.orr@independent.co.uk