UK Men Losing More Jobs Than Women After All - Building Gender Balanced Business

• It seemed a bit counter-intuitive, and contrary to the experience of the US so far, but the best information available indicated that women were losing more jobs in the UK than men.

• Now the latest data from the Office for National Statistics say otherwise. (They are hardly cheery, though, to be sure.)

• The redundancy, or layoff, rate for women was 6.6 per 1,000 employees in the three months to December 2008, less than half the men’s rate of 13.6 per 1,000 employees, the agency reported.

• The unemployment rate for women grew 0.3 percentage point to 5.5% in the period, while that of men rose 0.6 of a point to 6.9%.

• The Fawcett Society, which recently called for quotas for women on corporate boards in part to raise the profile of women in work, said of the latest figures, “Women have traditionally registered lower unemployment rates and redundancy levels due to several factors –- such as that women are less likely to be included in redundancy figures which only take into account workers who have been in service for at least two years.’’

The Financial Times article