MEN and women may feel equally tense approaching Ikea on a Sunday but that has not saved the Swedish furniture giant from accusations of discrimination.

The Prime Minister of Norway told a newspaper yesterday that there was “no justification” for Ikea showing only men assembling furniture in its instruction manuals.

They should change the illustrations, he said, “to promote attitudes for sexual equality”.

After a day spent poring frantically over instruction manuals, Ikea’s relieved staff told The Times that the Prime Minister had been misinformed. There were, in fact, at least two illustrations, in more than 2,000 manuals, showing women hard at work building furniture. Or there were if you included the one where a woman holds a cupboard door so that her man can do the difficult hinge-screwing bit.

Independent research by The Times found more women in other manuals, all restricted to holding panels in place for men to put together.

“There are women in the assembly instructions, but Ikea will review them in order to achieve a more even distribution of men and women,” a company spokeswoman said.

Ikea had originally told Verdens Gang, Norway’s leading daily newspaper, that women were excluded from the manuals out of respect for attitudes to women in Muslim countries.

A spokeswoman for the company, which has 208 stores in 32 countries including Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates, was quoted as saying: “We have to take account of cultural factors. In Muslim countries it is problematic to use women in instruction manuals.”

It was this that infuriated Kjell Magne Bondevik, the Norwegian Prime Minister. “This isn’t good enough,” he told Aslak Eriksrud, Verdens Gang’s political correspondent.

“It’s important to promote attitudes for sexual equality, not least in Muslim nations. They should change this. There’s no justification for it.”

Mr Bondevik is a relatively free spirit among politicians, famous for taking nearly a month off work because of stress during a previous stint as Prime Minister in 1998.

Perhaps he has also been frustrated by missing wooden dowels or badly bored holes in shelf units. “I myself have great problems with screwing together such furniture,” he admitted.

Mr Eriksrud said: “I was surprised that my Prime Minister had an opinion on Ikea’s instruction manuals. Norway is a small country and the politicians maybe speak their minds more than in England.” Ikea stores are visited by 310 million people a year around the world and it has been estimated that one in ten Europeans is conceived on an Ikea bed.

So do women find it harder than men to assemble the product? Bruce Greig, a psychology graduate who runs the London-based handyman service 0800handyman, says that his company receives more than 100 callouts a week to assemble flat-packed furniture, most of it by Ikea.

“More than half of the calls are from women and they will often call us without trying to do the job themselves,” he says.

“I think it’s a cultural thing: more women grow up not expecting to do DIY and lacking a role model who does. That doesn’t mean they are genetically less good at it but you’d have to separate identical twins at birth to prove that.”

It is, of course, by no means clear that all women would want this perception to change.

Lynn Riley, of the British Housewives’ League, said: “I think it’s the most wonderful thing that men do all the brutish jobs for us. Who on earth wants to be on their hands and knees trying to put things together when you’ve got a man who will do it for you? The only thing I want Ikea to provide now is the man.”

INITIAL WAY TO BUILD AN EMPIRE

Ikea opened its first British store in 1987. There was a riot at the opening of its thirteenth, in Edmonton, North London, last month

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