It’s women who’ll reap the benefit of this crunch

It's the kind of thing you hear more and more often - "I'm doing what I've always wanted to do"; "I'm spending more time with the kids and being a proper dad" - in response to that increasingly dangerous question: "What do you do?" And it's almost always dad, not mum, who's spending more time with the kids. That's because the economic crisis is hitting professional men harder than women, and thus shifting the balance of power between them.

Figures on unemployment in this recession suggest that more women than men have lost their jobs so far. That's because so many shop workers were sacked in the early stages of the downturn, and shops mostly employ women. But among professionals, a different pattern is emerging: male, testosterone-fuelled private-sector jobs are being lost, and cautious female public-sector jobs are surviving.

Financial services, at the centre of this crisis, are still dominated by men, as the constant stream of sex-discrimination cases suggests. Bankers work hours that are not compatible with child-rearing. Traders operate in an environment too viciously competitive for most women: a scientific study has established that the more testosterone a baby was dosed with in the womb, the more risks he takes and the better he performs as a trader.

Now, as the banks shrink, many of those jobs are disappearing. The parts of the City that are doing better are the lower-risk, lower-reward jobs in law and accountancy. Women are more visible in those areas.

The public sector, meanwhile, is growing, as the Government boosts spending to stimulate the economy. And the public sector is increasingly female. In medicine, for instance, around 60 per cent of new doctors are women; 58 per cent of recruits to the graduate fast track of the civil service are women. And although men are still paid more than women in the public sector, the difference is smaller than in the private sector.

The big gripe of women in the civil service, as elsewhere, is that the top jobs are still largely male. That's true; but it will change over the next few years. The main reason for the disparity is that women give up work, or take long breaks, to have children. But with husbands forced to spend more time with the kids, wives are going to have to hurry back to work; and as they do, they will elbow men off the top rungs of the civil service ladder.

These changes in the workplace will have an impact in the home. The balance of power there, as measured by the distribution of domestic labour, has already shifted a long way. According to a report just published by researchers at Oxford University, in 1961, women did four times as much work as men in the home. Now they do twice as much. That shift was driven by women's rising earning power and the increasing demands on their time outside home. This recession is going to speed up all of those trends.

Britain will become more equal over the next few years, mostly because men are going to lose out. I'm glad the balance of power is shifting, but I'm sorry it's happening this way.

Bad hair days are here again

Excellent news from the pop world: Spandau Ballet are getting back together again. Tony Hadley, the lead singer, says there will be a "new take on what Spandau Ballet are all about". But not, let us hope, new haircuts. These are dark times. We need all the laughs we can get ...

Eat a peck of dirt and flourish

When my children were young they paddled around on the floor shovelling dirt into their mouths, while other mothers raised their eyebrows and polished their children's faces with sterilised wipes. My behaviour, I'm afraid, was motivated by slovenliness, not science; but now I've got doctors lining up to applaud me. According to a report in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, there's been a 42 per cent rise in eczema since 2001.

Too much washing, researchers believe, may be to blame, because it dries out children's skin. And there's a wider "hygiene hypothesis" that attributes the general increase in allergies such as asthma and hay-fever to excessive cleanliness, which prevents the baby immune system from developing properly. So, young mothers, follow my example: put the wipes in the rubbish bin and the rubbish, with the baby, on the floor.