Affirmative Action and Discrimination against Whites

I know a couple of people who have claimed that because of positive discrimination it is now the case that White men are now face more discrimination than any other group. I think this issue is worth looking at for a couple of reasons. Firstly the most recent statistics I could find at the Office for National Statistics website show that the only group with a higher rate of employment is that of White women by around 1%. That is to say roughly that for a group of 100 White men around 95 would be employed whereas for White women it would be 96. In contrast the unemployment rate for most non-White groups was two or three times that. The sole exception was Indians at around 7% for men and 8% for women. This strongly suggests that discrimination against white men is likely to be marginal at best.
The second statistic I want to look at is the percentage of the population in managerial and professional jobs. Unfortunately these stats are only broken down by ethnicity and not by gender but they are still revealing. The most likely groups to be employed in managerial and professional jobs are in order Chinese, Indian and Whites. The least likely groups where Black Caribbean and Black African. As these jobs tend to be better paid than others this again suggests that there is little if any evidence of discrimination against White Men.
Of course these statistics are six years out of date and come from before the recession. It would be more interesting and illuminating to study statistics from 2008 or 2009 but as those are yet to be published we will have to stick with these. The other point to make is that my statistical analysis is crude at best. (Perhaps someone with a better understanding could crunch the numbers for me?)But given what we’ve got it suggests that White men do not need to fear discrimination. This raises two questions; the first is why do White men feel that they are being discriminated against? The second is whether the employment statistics show a case for affirmative action?
I suspect the answer to the first comes from an atmosphere whereby affirmative action schemes and minority pressure groups have received a lot of media attention. The effect is to create the impression of discrimination despite the lack of actual cases of it. Of there is some discrimination against White men put in proportion to the discrimination experienced by other groups it is small.
The second question I don’t feel able to answer, however it strikes me that there is a simple test for exploring whether there is a problem. If we assume that that there is no difference between ethnicities then we would expect business to have a roughly representative pattern of employment. Of course there are cultural and historical differences between ethnic groups so we should not be surprised when we find a group over represented in profession and under represented in another. However this lack of representation should be taken as a sign that there is something to investigate. Of course sometimes it may be obvious why this is the case. We would not expect to find many Pakistanis working behind a bar because most Pakistanis are Muslim and therefore regard bar work as haram (forbidden) but other times there may be a case of discrimination.