The figures show
that, in July, there were 300,460 men on the live register, compared to 166,364
women.

In May, Finola Bruton
warned that men were being hit much harder by the recession than women, and that
Irish men are being harder hit than their counterparts anywhere else in
Europe.

Mrs Bruton made the
remarks at a conference she chaired on women, home and work organised by The
Iona Institute.

The latest
information follows on from figures from the National Household Survey for the
fourth quarter of last year which showed that the female unemployment rate was
10 percent, while among men it is 17 percent, that is, fully 70 percent
higher.

Males also accounted
for a far higher share of the increase in the number of long term claimants on
the Live Register in July 2011.

The number of male
long term claimants increased by 32,494 in the year to July 2011, while the
comparable increase for females was 13,014.

This gap is higher
than virtually anywhere else in the industrialised world. In the EU-27 the
average unemployment rate for men and women is virtually the same at around 10
percent each.

Observers estimate
that the collapse in the construction industry, which is overwhelmingly male, is
one of the main drivers of the disproportionate level of male unemployment,
although that is also the case in Spain where there is not such a wide gap
between male and female unemployment.

In the last quarter
of 2008 there were 201,200 men employed in the construction sector but by the
last quarter of last year this had shrunk to just 102,000, an almost 50 percent
drop.

Women are also
thought to be protected from unemployment, relatively speaking, by the fact that
so many more than work in public sector jobs like teaching and
nursing.

In the education and
health sectors as a whole (including social work), 303,700 women are employed,
as against just 83,000 men.

Mrs
Bruton told the conference on women, home and work that the disparity
between male and female levels of unemployment was “in sharp contrast to all
other European countries, where the rates of unemployment are roughly
equal”.

“It is also
in contrast to the situation in Ireland in 2007, when male and female
unemployment rates were virtually the same. This difference is found among all
age groups. Of the under 25 year olds who are unemployed in Ireland 233,000 are
male and 123,000 are female”.

Mrs Bruton
acknowledged that unemployment was difficult for both men and women but she
suggested that for men, “whose self identified role in society is often defined
by what they do outside the home, unemployment is particularly traumatic”.