I READ an article last week about women employed in manual trades and I had a kind of epiphany (and it's not often you get one of those in front of A Question Of Sport). Forget about writing the great British novel -- I'm all for becoming a plumber.

First a quick history lesson: Britain used to be a great manufacturer. Then we decided that it would be much nicer, not to mention cheaper, if all the mucky work was done abroad and then we could all spend our days in lovely clean offices extolling the joys of post-it notes and flapjacks. Or something like that.

Anyway, manual trades, already pretty low on the prestige scale due to their association with the working classes, became massively under-subscribed. Meanwhile, the term "sweat shop call centres" was coined. Throw a stick in the air anywhere in Britain and you'll hit an office worker. Give 10,000 monkeys a stick each and you'll be hard pushed to graze a builder who can carry out the job within the same decade that he gave you the quote. You see, we're all middle class now -- just with leaky roofs.

The scarcity of reliable, pleasant, affordable tradesman (coupled with the fear factor of programmes like Rogue Traders) means that people are forced to kidnap joiners and keep them in the cellar until the next job needs doing, in case they decide to move to Australia in the meantime.

It's a simple case of supply and demand. But at least manual workers are finally getting paid what they deserve. It has always flummoxed me that the most enviable, enjoyable, and frankly undemanding jobs are paid silly money while those who have to endure hard graft, long hours, boredom or even immense danger are further penalized by shoddy pay and tasteless uniforms.

However, I digress. What caught my attention in this article was that a) the average woman in a manual job was earning a fairly impressive £25,000 a year, and b) although women have caught up with men in areas such as law, medicine and finance, they still make up less than one per cent of the manual trades.

Both of these points beg the question: Why the pigging hell aren't more women rolling up their sleeves and becoming tilers, joiners, electricians or decorators?

Perhaps women are still labouring under the misapprehension that they are too feeble of body and mind to get to grips with the business end of a socket wrench.

And yet they've been mastering household appliances for more years than you can poke a Dust Buster at. How else do the clothes get washed, the stairs vacuumed and the food cooked? If only women had thought about cracking on they were feeble-minded centuries ago they might have saved themselves a lifetime of dirty underwear and Shake'n'Vac.

So I say let women take over the manual trades. The work is satisfying, the pay is good, the hours are flexible and you can be your own boss. This could be a great opportunity. And then, if there has to be cleavage on show, at least it won't be bum cleavage.