Telegraph spinning employment figures

While writing my previous post about David Willets' blaming of feminism for the growth in disparity of household incomes, I noticed something strange in the Telegraph's report.

At the foot of the Telegraph's piece, I see a curious piece of spin happen:

Figures released by the Office for National Statistics yesterday showed a 23 per cent rise in mothers working full-time between 1996 and 2010. Two thirds of women were now in employment, compared with fewer than three quarters of men. Last month, there were nearly a million men out of work, compared with fewer than 500,000 women.

(my emphasis)

These figures don't seem to add up. Three quarters is 75%. Two thirds is 67% (to 2 significant figures). But the way it is phrased by the Telegraph, it sounds as though a greater proportion of men are out of work than women. What's more, the figures then quoted don't make sense. Let's say that "fewer than 75%" is in the region of 70%. That means that 1 million men represent about 30% of all men, meaning that there are only about 3.5 million men! By contrast, there seem to be only 1.5 million women.

So I went to the ONS website to find these figures for myself (they were published on 16th March). Of course, it turns out that the Telegraph is somewhat misleading in its reporting, and what we see here is a phenomenon I first noticed back in 1995 while I was using statistical data made available on CD-ROM to my secondary school. Employment rates (percentages of people in work) are different from unemployment figures (numbers of people claiming Jobseeker's Allowance).

What I learn after downloading the .pdf file from the ONS is that 991,300 men were claiming JSA and 457,300 women were claiming JSA. That's where the figures in the last sentence of the Telegraph's report come from.

What I also learn is that the Telegraph has outright lied about the employment rates. The ONS report says:

The employment rate for those aged from 16 to 64 was 70.5 per cent in the three months to January 2011, down 0.1 percentage point on the three months to October 2010 but up 0.1 percentage point from a year earlier. The employment rate for men aged from 16 to 64 was 75.7 per cent, down 0.2 percentage points on the previous quarter. The corresponding employment rate for women was 65.3 per cent, down 0.1 percentage point on the previous quarter.

The Telegraph has used the figure for all people as the figure for "men" (and what does that tell you about sexism in language?). As you can see, the figure for men is actually higher than 75%.

Obviously, the absurd calculations I showed above are based on two non-comparable figures, but just to clarify why there are actually around 40 million adults, rather than just 5 million adults, here's the other key figures:

The number of economically inactive people aged from 16 to 64 increased by 43,000 over the quarter to reach 9.33 million. The number of people who were economically inactive because they were looking after the family or home increased by 36,000 on the quarter to reach 2.30 million.

...

The number of people in employment was 29.16 million in the three months to January 2011, up 32,000 from the three months to October 2010 and up 296,000 on a year earlier. The number of people in full-time employment was 21.24 million in the three months to January 2011, up 75,000 from the three months to October 2010. Of this total, 13.62 million were men and 7.62 million were women. The number of people in part-time employment was 7.91 million in the three months to January 2011, down 43,000 from the three months to October 2010. Of this total, 2.01 million were men and 5.90 million were women.

So, I decided to dig a little deeper and looked up the table in the .pdf from which these figures for economic inactivity (and specifically, "looking after the family or home").

It turns out that over 90% of those inactive due to looking after family or home are women (2.1 million, 35% as against 198,000 men, 5.9%). The other areas in which there was a large disparity were "retired" (1.1 million women, 18.4 as against 0.45 million men, 13.8), and "discouraged" (48,000 men, 1.4% as against 28,000 women 0.5%).

One other interesting fact emerges from the data. 1 million men, and 1.36 million women, want a job. But we noted earlier that only 457,300 women as against 991,300 men are claiming JSA. This seems like an odd discrepancy, with vastly greater numbers of women apparently not on JSA for some reason, even though they are out of work and seeking. I don't know what the explanation for that would be, and may conceivably be innocent, but it looks as though there is some disproportionate barrier to women claiming JSA as compared to men.