British workers are taking home less money real terms than 14 years ago with men being hit hardest by the fall in wages that followed the financial crisis, according to new report from the Institute of Fiscal Studies.

From 2008 to 2014, women’s average hourly pay fell by 2.5% in real terms while men’s pay fell 7.3%, nearly three times faster than women.

Feminist groups, led by the Fawcett Society, have repeatedly claimed that the recession and the government's response to it is having "a disproportionate effect on women, making many women poorer and less financially autonomous".

As far as wages and jobs are concerned, women have been more likely to have their jobs protected because they are more likely to enjoy the greater job security of working in the public sector.

Men account for a third (34%) of public sector workers; six out of 10 (58%) of the UK’s private sector employees; seven out of 10 (68%) of the country’s 4.6 million self employed workers and eight out of 10 (81%) self-employed people who work full time.

Men’s jobs are generally less recession proof than women, a fact that led some commentators to dub the global economic decline of 2008-2012 the “great mancession”.

In the UK for example, the number of men in work fell at nearly 50 times the rate of the number of the women in work. By the start of 2012 there were 387,000 fewer men in work (a net fall of 2.4%) than in the first quarter of 2008, according to a report by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development. By contrast the number of women in work was only 8,000 (0.05%) lower.

Research on the impact of the recession found that the most recent economic crisis was linked to an additional 1,000 suicides in the UK and 84% of these recession suicides were men.

Article by Glen Poole author of the book Equality For Men

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See also:

The top 10 ways men get a raw deal at work