The glass ceiling debate has garnered an extraordinary new piece of evidence. Research in the Journal of Economic Analysis and Policy has dug deep to find why women continue to earn less money than men, even in similar jobs. The see-saw debate: It’s either gender discrimination or simply that women slow down their career in favour of a family. The recent research suggests discrimination. Researchers found that women who were established in jobs and who then underwent sex changes to become men actually increased their earnings slightly, but that men who had the snip to become women lost about one-third of their earning power. Ouch (in every sense!)

Good golly Miss Molly; what a week it’s been for swinging the axe. In total 15,000 jobs gone this week, making the prediction of 2m unemployed by Christmas not seem such a far fetched idea. 3,000 staff are to go from RBS, mainly in the global banking and markets workforce. But before you grab your noose, remember this is from an overall workforce of 170,000. Virgin Media, Yell, GlaxoSmithKline and JCB have joined the elbow-ers with more than 5,000 job cuts between them. Then there’s BT – 10,000 jobs to go by March next year, despite turning in £75 profit a second. Incidentally, 4,000 of the 10,000 had already gone pre-credit crunch as part of making the business leaner, so there is a little bit of scare-mongering by the press on this one, surprise surprise.  The fact is chaps, companies are still hiring, but competition is more fierce. My advice is get someone else to do the leg work. Our pals at the Graduate Recruitment Bureau are paid by employers to find them the best grads, so it doesn’t cost you a penny to have them assess you and put you forward for roles. A similar story for the financial sector with Benedix who offer advice and advertise posts. Job done.