Does the Minimum Wage strangle job creation?

The chamber rejected the idea that the minimum wage strangles job creation by 19 votes to 13, a 41 per cent yes share and an 18-point margin — decisive, but well short of a rout. Of the 32 who voted with a profile attached, the "no" camp had the numbers everywhere except among women.

The sharpest fracture here is gender rather than age. Men voted no by 13 to 5 (just 28 per cent yes), effectively delivering the result on their own, while the five women who voted split the other way, 3 yes to 2 no. That is a small sample, but the direction is stark: the scepticism about wage floors and employment came almost entirely from male voters.

Age tells a much flatter story. The middle cohorts, 25-34 and 35-44, were close to evenly split (47 and 50 per cent yes respectively), while the few voters at the extremes — the youngest and the over-65s — leaned no, though on numbers too thin to read much into. There is none of the generational battle-line you'd expect from a debate that touches both entry-level hiring and pensioner living costs.

This is the perennial minimum-wage argument in miniature: business-cost anxiety against a labour market still near record employment, and on this evidence it was men, not the young workers most exposed to entry-level hiring decisions, driving the "no".