cloning question

I have read some threads on the cloning process and believe that I would be able to do it with some practice and more research. From what I understand the clone is to be taken before the plant is flowered. If I do this, how am I supposed to know that the plant I am cloning is actually a female. I was wrong about a couple of plants on my first grow and it would be a horrible waste of time to accidentally clone a male. I understand some female plants are shorter and bushier than the males, but I am working with an unfamiliar strain. Any ideas on how to be certain about a plant's sex before flowering?

Ys there are. They instruction are confusing and a lot of folks end up not cloning because they don't understand it, I was one of those. Let's take a quick look at the subject. If you take two clone's from every plant you have, when you are just ready to put them in flowering when you want to trim them any way to aid in air circulation and let the light penetrate, and then half the plants turn out male what would you have left. Lets say you started with 6. 6x2=12 clones. half males, leaves 3 female's flowering, and six female clones in vegging. I always took another set of two clones off each two weeks later, which of course doubles the amount of female clones you end up with. Your costs. well if you did the double take and meet the law of averages, you would have to throw out 12 of whatever medium you cloning in and maybe the medium from a first transplant and you gained 12 female clones. I think its a pretty easy choice. I used this method to go from 20 to 80 female plants in a matter of months. VV