It’s doing the rounds that women are being harder hit than men in the recession and that this should therefore influence government policy decisions in response to rising unemployment. Indeed, according to press reports, female cabinet ministers have already successfully lobbied the prime minister to include a special session on the plight of women workers at the G20 economic summit due to be held in London in April.

Although there is nothing wrong in principle with such a focus, one shouldn’t accept at face value the assertion that UK women are losing jobs at a faster rate than men. The claim is being propounded by an unholy alliance between protagonists for improved statutory employment rights for women (who find it easier to pursue their broader policy agenda if people think women are hard done by) and business lobbyists opposed to employment regulation who, on the contrary, reckon that the recession will validate their argument that women are now too costly to employ and will therefore suffer more than men when the axe falls on jobs.

However, neither part of this alliance appears to have looked at the available evidence. It is a truism that more women will lose jobs in this recession than in previous recessions – but that’s because there are simply lots more women in the workforce. Yet, while one can’t yet rule out the possibility that women will lose out relative to men in the jobs stakes as the recession unfolds, this is categorically not true of the jobs downturn to date.

Men account for eight in 10 of the jobs lost between the beginning of the jobs downturn in the spring of 2008 and the late autumn (the latest period for which official figures are available). During that period male employment fell by more (0.7 per cent) than female employment (0.3 per cent) while the number of unemployed men increased by almost 200,000 (21 per cent) compared with 96,000 additional unemployed women (an increase of 14 per cent). The male redundancy rate has doubled, while the female rate has risen by two-thirds.

Full-time employment has fallen faster for men (down 1.2 per cent) than for women (down 0.5 per cent). Both men and women have benefited from rising part-time employment. Interestingly, however, part-time employment for men has grown by much more than part-time employment for women, in both absolute and percentage terms (up 5.6 per cent for men and 0.6 per cent for women).

Only with regard to part-time work have women so far done less well than men in this recession. And part-time employment for women has at least increased overall. Thus, the suggestion that women are being relatively hard hit by the recession looks to be something of an exaggeration.