LETTER : Women graduates struggle to get jobs too

Bob Ward
Saturday 18 March 1995 19:02 EST
Comments

Your support helps us to tell the story

From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging.

At such a critical moment in US history, we need reporters on the ground. Your donation allows us to keep sending journalists to speak to both sides of the story.

The Independent is trusted by Americans across the entire political spectrum. And unlike many other quality news outlets, we choose not to lock Americans out of our reporting and analysis with paywalls. We believe quality journalism should be available to everyone, paid for by those who can afford it.

Your support makes all the difference.

THE article by Simon Midgley and Barrie Clement, "So what is the point of young men?" (12 March), contained a couple of misleading statements concerning the relative successes of men and women graduates in obtaining jobs.

First, the figures apparently showing that "women graduates now find it easier to get jobs than their male counterparts" are considerably biased by teacher- training courses where women outnumber men by four to one. Since more than four-fifths of these graduates find permanent jobs, excluding them from the overall figures reduces the "sex difference" in employment rates to an imperceptible 1.1 percentage points.

Second, jobs are not "most plentiful" for engineering and technology graduates, who record below average employment and above average unemployment rates.

In fact, because men constitute 87 per cent of the output from these disciplines, it is not surprising that graduate employment rates for men are lower than those for women.

Bob Ward

Statistics Department

Higher Education Careers Services Unit

Manchester

Join our commenting forum

Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies

Comments

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged inPlease refresh your browser to be logged in