It's tough being on top, boys

More men have now complained about sex discrimination in jobs than women.

So 1996 is the year that men finally went out and burnt their boxer shorts. Slammed by the Child Support Agency, emasculated by feminists, emotional and confused men are fighting back for equal rights.

Yesterday, the Equal Opportunities Commission confirmed that complaints from men were up 10 per cent on the previous year and - for the first time in its 20-year history - it has had more complaints about sexism in job recruitment from men than from women.

So all those endless pub harangues with blokes whingeing that "a woman will always be chosen for a job in front of a man" weren't merely self- pitying whines into the bottom of beer glasses. They were a statistic.

Men now face a 10.5 per cent unemployment rate compared with women's 4.3 per cent because the traditional heavy industry jobs-for-life have disappeared. But men's forays into the previously female-dominated areas of child care, nursing and hairdressing have been largely unsuccessful.

The EOC is currently celebrating a pounds 2,500 out-of-court settlement for a male nurse refused a job with the RAF. Another case included a bricklayer who was refused a job as a secretary in case he was reluctant to make tea. And two men were aggrieved enough to go to the EOC after they were turned down for the Women's Environmental Network, an organisation that campaigns, among other things, on menstruation.

Yes, it's clear. Women are on the rise and men can't do anything to stop it, poor things. Every week another story of male subjugation seems to develop. New Man has given way to Redundant Male, and boy, do we hear about it.

It's not just leading proponents of the British men's movement such as David Thomas (the author of Not guilty: in defence of the modern man) who are bringing men's plight to our attention. It's everywhere.

A report by the think-tank Demos spoke gloomily of "male underachievement in schools", of the absence of fathers' rights and of the unhappiness of divorced men (72 per cent of divorces are now initiated by women; and 51 per cent of divorced men later said they would have preferred to stay married.)

By comparison, the "genderquake" - the rise of women's social and economic power - found four out of five women between 16 and 35 wanting to develop their career or find employment, and only half seeing having children as a goal.

So we women, the first generation after the Sex Discrimination Act, have got it all - the career, the optimism, the success. Wonderful.

But that's only until you realise women's and men's rate of pay can differ by as much as 27 per cent while doing the same job. And while women form 44 per cent of the workforce compared with 37 per cent 20 years ago, their greatest inroads are in part-time, low-paid jobs. Women who take a break to have a baby find it hard ever to catch up with their male counterparts.

And while men have overtaken women in complaining about sexism in job recruitment, only a quarter of sex discrimination complaints inside the workplace come from men (and are mainly to do with internal promotions and differing entitlement ages for pensions).

So men, who may have feared letting women into the boardroom would result in hundreds of Disclosure-style harassment, can rest easy. They are unlikely to encounter Demi Moore clones wherever they turn. Nor are they likely to summon up much sympathy from women when they complain about another EOC case where a male country club receptionist was sacked by employers in favour of a "pretty girl". If that's positive discrimination, they can keep it.

And feminism hasn't meant that women can have it all. The Demos report reveals women still do two or three times the amount of cleaning as working men, and still take primary responsibility for child care.

So don't believe men have suddenly got the monopoly on being oppressed. Grow up, boys, equality in the workplace, for male secretaries or female welders, is what we should all be striving for.