The Pew Research Centre in the US has produced a new headline grabbing study which says that in 40pc of American households, the woman is the main breadwinner.

At face value that figure of 40pc seems to indicate that a huge social revolution is taking place in family life and that is indeed the case, but it is not the revolution that the figure might at first indicate.

At first blush, what the figure might be taken to mean is that in 40pc of US households the woman is out-earning the man.

However, what the figure is actually revealing isn’t this at all. The Pew study shows that in just 15pc of married households the wife out-earns the husband (and more power to her elbow).

So where does the figure of 40pc come from? It comes from the huge rise in the number of households headed by lone mothers.

Therefore the social revolution we’re looking at is less the increase in the number of high-earning women and more the increase in family breakdown.

Lone parent households are created in two main ways. The first is divorce and separation, and the second is the failure of a relationship between the mother and father of a child to ever form in the first place.

In other words, the Pew study does not reveal female empowerment half as much as we may think. What it really reveals is family breakdown, the principle victims of which are, of course, children.