Closing Gaps--and Widening Them

According to The Economist ("Closing gaps," March 25, p. 36), the British government recently appointed a commission to look into ethnic discrimination in employment. The commission, happily, reported back that it was disappearing: non-whites are closing the gap.

This the commission, and The Economist, credits to the current economic boom. For, before it began in 1992, Bangladeshis and Pakistanis were actually falling further behind. But once there is a job shortage, employers can no longer afford to discriminate.

Now here’s the next puzzle: why did an earlier boom, in the eighties, do nothing to help non-whites?

Simple, really. As The Economist explains, in those days, thanks to feminism, women were entering the workforce in droves. “The previous economic boom sucked in a reserve army of women workers.”

In other words: jobs given to women are, generally speaking, jobs taken from the poor and given to the rich. Women, usually, represent a second income for their families; and poor women have always had to work outside the home if they could. The influx into the workforce in the seventies and eighties was of middle class and upper class women, and they were taking jobs that would otherwise have had to go to the poor.

They still are, of course. And “affirmative action” programmes exacerbate this. The rich get richer, and the poor get a kick in the cojones.