Ms or myth: Just who is getting made redundant?

It has become received wisdom that women are much more likely than men to lose their jobs in the current downturn. But is it true?

It sounds so plausible - women make up a larger proportion of the public sector where the cuts are biting. And the latest unemployment figures do show that of the 28,000 rise in jobless in the latest figures, 22,000 are women.

But that doesn't mean more women lost their jobs. In fact, more women have won jobs - the female employment rate in Britain has risen. In the year to last autumn, an additional 32,000 women were in work and experts say the trend has continued since then.

What has happened is that more women have entered the workforce and many of those fresh to the labour market have not been able to get a job. To put it another way, the number of women joining the queue of jobseekers is greater than the number of women who have found jobs.

What the stats don't show is that women are more likely to receive a redundancy notice than men. On the contrary, it is men who have experienced a fall in employment over the past year. Despite cuts to a female-dominated public sector, it is male workers who appear to be getting the chop.

This is not what people expected. John Philpot, chief economic advisor of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD), identified the paradox in a paper published last December and suggested it was "probably in part due to the increased effort of policy-makers to encourage lone mothers on benefit to seek work".

That might be the explanation, but those women still needed to find jobs and we are constantly being told that family/friendly public sector jobs are the ones that are disappearing.

There is a bit of a mystery here and one which the CIPD acknowledges. "Why ongoing job losses in the public sector are not hitting women harder than men is an interesting question, and one to which the answer is not immediately apparent," they told me today, expressing frustration that official ONS public/private job stats don't have a gender breakdown.

The CIPD suggests it could be that more women have been losing jobs than men in the public sector but have been better than men at getting jobs in other sectors. "It could be that recruitment freezes or natural wastage reductions affect men and women more equally despite the relatively high share of women in the public sector workforce," they say. "Either way, however, there is no simple cause and effect between what's happening in the public sector and the rise in female unemployment."