So wait, is this actually an april fools?

The world moves on but there is no use pretending that the past didn't exist.

The labour movement, and even this newspaper, held the line that working men's jobs were for working men, and only men, for a very long time. Professionals, the upper middle classes, their place was safe and they never needed to fight to exclude anyone simply on the grounds of their sex. There are plenty of other ways to block people from becoming, say, a barrister, (and they still exist). Crude sex discrimination was never worth the bother.

Now, is the world a better place for feminism? Without a doubt. Have working class men benefited? Has their position in the hierarchy been adjusted? That things are unpalatable doesn't mean they are untrue. Society is what we make of it, not what we refuse to acknowledge as true.

Best to be big about past attitudes and acknowledge change as opposed to getting all indignant that anyone would dare point things out. But this is not 1950 anymore, is it?

So it's all womens' fault - again! The only woman at fault here is the woman who bought this dinosaur into the world.

He could always stop the policy of forcing single mothers in to the work place by compelling them to get a job when their children reach a certain age, that would free up a few jobs for the boys wouldn't it, assuming they are qualified to do the menial jobs that a lot of women do because (a) it fits in with their child care needs and (b) men can't or won't.

Not sure you're giving Willetts a fair hearing on this point. His argument is that 'education upgrading'(more young people getting more qualifications) has corresponded to less rather than more social mobility, and a greater gap between household incomes.

David Willetts argues that this is because the increase in qualifications was captured almost entirely by middle class women, to the exclusion of working class people in general. This doesn't seem that unreasonable, even if (as Willetts says) "it is of course absolutely right that women should have education and employment opportunities open to them that were closed a generation ago."

This effect has an even bigger impact on social inequality because of "assortive mating" - the fact that well paid, well educated men and women marry other well paid, well educated men and women. Because inequality is measured by household - this has increased inequality drastically on official measures.

It used to be possible to run a household on one wage, regardless of the gender of that breadwinner.

Now, any house with less than two full-time workers will struggle without tax-credits/benefits... oh, wait a minute!

Feminism has entitled women to to same enslavement as men to market forces.

@Subotan. I love reddit. It is the most funny and thoughtful portal on the web, but there does seem to be a streak of misogyny running through parts of the website, which I find bizarre and - as a redditor - upsetting.

The Right will always try to convince the working class to blame other workers for the failures of capitalism. If it's not blacks holding us back it's Asians, if it's not Asians it's welfare 'scroungers'. Today, it appears, it's women.

It's laughable, I know, but if people started looking elsewhere they might just start blaming realising that the last 40 years of stagnation are due to the hegemony of neoliberal capitalism.

Has nobody else noticed Subotan was just openly racist?

1R4M: The same can be said about men too.

I'm not normally a defender of Mr Willetts, but with the Telegraph (and the Mail) it often pays to read the body of the article, not just the spin their sub editors put on it. The key paragraphs in the body are:

Mr Willetts, who set out his views on feminism in his recent book, The Pinch, said that, as a result of better education for women, households now contained two people who were either both financially successful or struggling to get on.
“One of the things that happened over that period was that the entirely admirable transformation of opportunities for women meant that with a lot of the expansion of education in the 1960s, 70s and 80s, the first beneficiaries were the daughters of middle-class families who had previously been excluded from educational opportunities,” he said.
“And if you put that with what is called 'assortative mating’ — that well-educated women marry well-educated men — this transformation of opportunities for women ended up magnifying social divides. It is delicate territory because it is not a bad thing that women had these opportunities, but it widened the gap in household incomes because you suddenly had two-earner couples, both of whom were well-educated, compared with often workless households where nobody was educated.”

Which seems more an observation of the data than a value judgement.

Divide and rule, oldest trick in the book. At a time of crsis, make sure you set the working classes and the women in opposition so they can squabble quietly in the background while you get on with running things.

On a completely different note - I suspect if Laurie Penny had written it, it would have generated more bile-specked vemon than this one has. Strange, that.....

Willetts, of course, is a reactionary with suitably backwards views, but who is this "Wayne" in the headline? Is he the NS's stereotype of a working class person?

What Willetts has highlighted – somewhat uncomfortably for the unreconstructed New Labour and New Statesman-reading inteligensia – is that there are limits to the level of ‘fairness’ that sex equality, race equality, and disability equality legislation can deliver. Yes, it can make the workplace appear superficially ‘representative’ but if, because of a failure to eradicate class inequality, it merely opens up opportunities for middle class women, middle class BME people, and middle class people with disabilities, social mobility will remain low.

There were, predictably, howls of derision from Yvette Cooper of my very own Labour Party, who claimed that “the idea that working women are responsible for persistent child poverty or youth unemployment in disadvantaged areas is just shocking”. Sadly, however, this is merely a fig leaf to hide Labour’s embarrassing record on social mobility and its deliberate strategy in power of making social and economic egalitarianism subordinate to the liberal inteligenisia’s obsession with an approach to ‘equalities’ that gave no thought to class inequality.

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