Full text of DOI:10.1111/1467-8543.00158

British Journal of Industrial Relations
38:2 June 2000 0007±1080 pp. 183±201
Feminism Facing Industrial Relations
in Britain
Judy Wajcman
Abstract
This is an opportune time to renegotiate the boundaries between industrial
relations theory and feminist analysis in Britain. Such a bargain would involve
going beyond an agreement to add `women's issues' to the research agenda, to
a recognition of the gendered character of employment relations and of work
itself. The formal institutions involved, namely, management, trade unions and
the state, cannot be treated as gender-neutral. Further, the very way industrial
relations scholars define what is `inside' the industrial relations system and
what is `outside' reflects masculine priorities and privilege.
1. Introduction
Our conception of industrial relations as a field of inquiry has changed over
the last decade alongside the political and industrial landscape in the UK.
The decline in collective bargaining coverage, union density and strikes
means that these can no longer be the central preoccupations of those
working in the field. The focus has extended from the management of
industrial conflict to a concern with the employment relationship more
broadly. One result of this shift has been an increased awareness of the
gendered character of employment relations. Yet a glance at the contents of
the mainstream journals and textbooks indicates that, although some
progress has been made, gender issues remain marginal to much of the
current research agenda. While feminist scholarship has reshaped the social
sciences, it has made surprisingly few inroads into the field of industrial
relations Ð this despite the feminization of the paid labour force, one of the
most important social changes in the twentieth century.
Industrial relations research is commonly criticized for the primacy it
accords to the description of the institutions of trade unions and collective
bargaining arrangements at the expense of social processes such as influence
and mobilization (Bain and Clegg 1974; Kelly 1998). It is much less
Judy Wajcman is the Hallsworth Senior Fellow in the Sociology Department at the University
of Manchester.
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184 British Journal of Industrial Relations
recognized that this continuing institutionalist bias has been associated with
gender blindness. The major institutions analysed Ð that is management,
trade unions and the state Ð which appear in the literature as gender neutral
are indeed profoundly gendered. The tendency in industrial relations studies
to overlook the masculinity of their usual subjects means that aspects of
employment and industrial relations systems remain hidden. To demon-
strate this I will draw on related disciplines, such as sociology, organization
and management studies, which seem to have been more receptive to the
idea that the gender of employees and managers does matter. I go on to
discuss how the decline in manufacturing and the growth of services has
altered the nature of work, highlighting the significance of gender and
personal identity to the performance of particular kinds of work. Finally,
I argue that, while feminist theory has deconstructed the divide between
work and home, between the public and the private, much industrial
relations research continues to operate with this dichotomy.
This article considers the extent of, and the reasons for, the continuing
absence of regular and systematic consideration of gender in industrial
relations analysis. While some questions relating to women's work have
been taken up, notably sex segregation in the labour market and equal pay,
women are generally treated as a special case in that men are still assumed to
be the universal standard against which women are measured. It is women
who are marked as `gendered', the ones who are different. As a result,
insufficient attention has been paid to the social processes involved in the
sex-typing of jobs and to the ways in which discrimination against women is
institutionalized in the labour market. This is because power-based gender
relations has been defined as outside the scope of industrial relations. I will
argue that remedying this is not a matter of simply adding women on, or
including studies of `women's issues'. Rather, we need to recognize the
gendered character of work itself and to integrate this understanding into
the field's research agenda.
2. Putting women in the picture
That women are still marginal to the study of industrial relations is apparent
from a survey of the major journals and textbooks over the last ten years.1
Although women workers increasingly have received attention, there is
little recognition that the experiences of work and the workplace may be
very different for men and women. For example, in the British Journal of
Industrial Relations gender issues have been raised mainly in relation to
three topics: equal pay/wages structures (Rubery 1992; Gilbert and Secker
1995; Rubery 1997), discrimination in training (Miller 1994; Green and
Zanchi 1997; Wooden and VandenHeuvel 1997), and unionization (Sinclair
1995). Australian and Canadian industrial relations journals similarly
maintain women's invisibility except in relation to a few recognized areas,
that is, labour market discrimination and part-time/precarious employment.
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Feminism Facing Industrial Relations 185
Indeed, the gender bias of Australian, British and Canadian industrial
relations theory has been the subject of critiques by Pocock (1997), Rubery
and Fagan (1995) and Forrest (1993) respectively. Interestingly, the US
journals fare better. The Industrial and Labor Relations Review (Cornell) has
performed particularly well, in terms of both the number and breadth of
articles on gender, perhaps because there are more senior women in the
faculty and on their editorial board. In Britain, by contrast, the academic
field in still largely peopled by men.
Increasingly, industrial relations textbooks do now include a chapter
dealing with `women's issues', either on equal opportunities (e.g. Liff in
Edwards 1995) or sex segregation in the labour market (e.g. Rubery and
Fagan, in Hyman and Ferner 1994). The indexes of several popular
textbooks (Blyton and Turnbull 1998; Edwards 1995; Farnham and Pimlott
1995; Hyman and Ferner 1994; Kessler and Bayliss 1995) contain many
entries under `women', for example on equal opportunities, low pay, part-
time work, labour flexibility and trade unions. Significantly, there are no
entries under `men' or male workers. This betrays the assumption implicit
in these key texts that industrial relations is in fact the study of men. There
is certainly more consideration than a decade ago of women's relationship
to the institutions that are the focus of other chapters. However, a gender
analysis is not fully integrated into the subject matter as a whole.
Although the traditional research bias towards manufacturing industries
is no longer so pronounced, we still know a great deal more about manu-
facturing than private sector services, and about male manual workers
compared with female clerical workers (see Lucas 1996; Rubery and Fagan
1995). In addition, the focus on the institutions of collective bargaining
means that workers who are outside the formally constituted labour market,
such as homeworkers, paid domestic workers, teleworkers and the self-
employed, seldom feature.
The predominant masculine orientation of industrial relations cannot be
explained as an accurate reflection of the current state of research on work
and employment. There is a burgeoning literature on gender and work,
unions and the state in the companion fields of history, political science,
sociology and law. In these fields, feminism has reinvigorated research and
extended the traditional scope of inquiry. To try to understand the industrial
relations orientation, let us look at two issues that have been commonly
canvassed within industrial relations: gender pay differentials and sex segre-
gation in employment.
3. Raising women's pay
The dimensions of pay inequality have been the subject of much excellent
work, especially by labour market economists. It is important to consider
why this issue has been taken up, the way in which it has been taken up, and
why it has not spurred on a more thoroughgoing gender analysis within the
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186 British Journal of Industrial Relations
field of industrial relations. This is necessary for a more profound under-
standing of unequal pay as well as of the way gender relations underpin the
structure of the labour market.
Pay is a central issue in industrial relations. It was the key bargaining
issue in the postwar era, a period during which workers won real wage rises
through industrial campaigns. Although the agenda has shifted in more
recent times to issues such as job security and working hours, pay remains
a central issue in bargaining. At the same time, we live in a society where
money is the measure of all things including equality and social justice. The
fetishist character of money has far-reaching consequences. A core value of
democratic societies is a liberal commitment to equality between the sexes.
Clearly, one form of equality crucial to gender equity is the distribution of
real per capita income. It is key to women's economic independence in an
age where the ideal of the `family wage' is losing its normative salience.
Studying the gender pay gap has considerable appeal as a way to open and
close the equality question.
Research on pay inequality is also methodologically attractive because
levels of pay are easily quantifiable and generalizable across all manner of
jobs and employees. There are writers within industrial relations who have
demonstrated that wages reflect all kinds of historical and institutional
assumptions (e.g. Brown and Nolan 1988; Rubery 1997), but for some
researchers a focus on pay means being able to operate within the relative
comfort of the neoclassical framework of the theory of wages. Researchers
`are therefore absolved from having to worry too much about the operation
of the ``black box'' which is the organisation' (Arrowsmith and Sisson 1999:
72).2 Human agency is lost behind the statistics. Thus, many authors who
address the issue of pay differences conceptualize the problem as one of
measurement; they describe what is. Authors who do attempt to explain pay
inequality generally do so in terms of occupational segregation. There is
now a mini industry, for example, debating the `correct' measures of sex
segregation (see e.g. Blackburn et al. 1993). The nature of the substantive
conclusions one can draw is barely affected by the measures that are used.
Sex segregation is primarily of interest in so far as it can be correlated with
pay differentials.
Obviously, knowledge of the patterning of pay inequalities is extremely
valuable and has considerable policy relevance. However, what is missing
from most of this literature is any sustained attempt to explain why sex
segregation comes about and how it is maintained. For example, women's
pay inequality may well arise because women's skills and predominantly
female areas of work are undervalued; but why is it that these skills and
workplaces are underrated? Rather than looking at the processes by which
jobs themselves become sex-typed, many authors focus on manipulating the
data in ever more sophisticated ways. As Humphries and Rubery (1995)
point out, the unsatisfactory definition of discrimination embedded in
economic analyses of the labour market precludes such processes ever being
examined.
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Feminism Facing Industrial Relations 187
Moreover, an overriding concern with equal pay as the ultimate measure
of social justice in employment can be seriously misleading. Money is only
one form of gender power relations in the workplace and in the labour
market. There are many other aspects to power inequality, such as equality
of opportunity to pursue careers, or to participate fully in trade unions or
works councils, equality in relation to choices about working time and
leisure time, and equality of respect and freedom from sexual harassment.
Even if women's hourly pay one day reaches that of men's, this will not
signify that gender parity has been achieved.
Indeed, industrial relations academics seldom make a connection between
the reasons why women's jobs are undervalued and the substantive concerns
of their field. The issue is defined as outside the discipline because its genesis
is seen to lie in family rather than workplace relations, a point to which I will
return. Furthermore, as Forrest (1993: 419) notes: `The discipline has no
interest in the doings of women, or men for that matter; the only ``actors'' in
the ``system'', to use Dunlop's terminology, are workers, managers, and trade
unionists.' As a result, the field has been blind to the gendered character of
the institutions that shape work and employment relations.
Let us now turn to look at one of the key institutions that has occupied
the attention of industrial relations researchers, namely, trade unions.
4. Trade unions as masculine organizations
Patterns of union growth and decline are key research topics in the
industrial relations field. Typically, research on recruitment rates and
membership decline examine structural factors, such as movements in the
business cycle, the effects of legislation, employers' policies and composi-
tional changes (Bain and Elsheikh 1976; Booth 1995). In the past, women's
relationship to trade unions was conventionally analysed rather differently
from men's. Evidence was presented to show that women are less likely to
join unions (e.g. Clegg 1976). In these studies, the category of women is
treated as one variable in an analysis that seeks to capture the complexity of
people's experience of trade unions. Their behaviour is generally explained
in terms of their sex, which predisposes them to be less interested in unions.
By contrast, scholars are not usually inclined to explain men's union activity
by reference to `male' characteristics, or for example the long association
between proletarian masculinity and militancy. The implicit assumption in
this approach is that unionists are men, while women as workers or trade
unionists are deviant from a male norm. `In this way ``women'' as a category
of analysis has placed over-emphasis on the issue of women-as-women, and
problematised that sex, while workers who are men are rarely spoken of
with respect to their sex' (Pocock 1997: 6).
It is much more common these days to account for sex differences in
membership rates not simply in terms of women's characteristics, but rather
in terms of their place in the labour market (Kelly 1990; Heery 1998;
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188 British Journal of Industrial Relations
Williams 1997). For example, Waddington and Whitston (1997: 525) em-
phasize that any apparent sex differences in the reasons why people join
unions, and the methods of their recruitment, are `a function of employment
location rather than sex'. Studies in this vein that compare men and women
in similar positions are a welcome advance on the earlier literature. How-
ever, they too have their limitations. Explaining women's lower rates of
unionization in terms of their concentration in jobs that are `hard to
organize' leaves unexamined why such jobs should be so hard to organize.
That women do `women's work' and that job segregation exists is treated as
a fact of life by many scholars of industrial relations, `rather than [as] an
industrial relations phenomenon that needs to be understood from within'
(Forrest 1993: 417).
In the absence of any consideration of occupational sex segregation as an
institutionalized form of discrimination against women, the implication is
that women choose `women's' work. For example, they `prefer' part-time
jobs because these allow them to accommodate their family responsibilities,
and they are content with the low pay attached to `women's' work because
theirs is a second income. The basic flaw in this kind of analysis, as many
feminists have argued for a long time, is the simplistic fashion in which the
notions of choice and commitment to paid work are deployed (Wajcman
1981; England 1982). The notion of `commitment' implies that the `choices'
made by married women Ð such as whether to work part-time or full-time
or at all Ð are a matter of unconstrained will, rather than being heavily
conditioned by structured social arrangements that impose limits on what
women can do. A useful corrective to this view can be found in Walsh's
(1999) recent study, which reveals the diversity among the part-time work-
force (see also Crompton 1997).
Much industrial relations literature still stresses the salience of family life
for women (at times reflecting an underlying assumption that women's
relationship to their work and unions can be deduced from their domestic
and family responsibilities), while overlooking the interrelationship between
home and work life as experienced by men. Certain factors are defined
as appropriate in the study of either women's work or men's, but not in
both. Using the distinction made by Feldberg and Glenn (1984), we see
that the `job model' has linked men's work attitudes and behaviour to
their occupational experiences, while the `gender model', invoked only for
women, has linked their employment relations to their family experi-
ences. Although it can be difficult to distinguish theoretically between the
indirect effects of domestic responsibilities arising from the sexual division
of labour in households and the gender effects of processes internal to
the labour market, the latter has frequently been neglected in industrial
relations.
As a consequence, the structural and cultural mechanisms of unions
themselves have rarely been given a central place in explanations of gender
differences in participation and power. While there is increasing recognition
that collective bargaining has been orientated to the white, full-time male
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Feminism Facing Industrial Relations 189
work-force, there is less awareness of possible conflicts between the interests
of women and `mainstream' union activities, budgets, priorities and habits
of organizing. One exception to this general trend is an examination of why
people abandon their union membership (Waddington and Kerr 1999). This
shows the extent to which union organization eschews institutions and
practices that can maintain union membership among women Ð in other
words, the extent to which unions remain masculine organizations. Colling
and Dickens's (1989) observation that the actual ground of collective
bargaining is too limited to address effectively the concerns of women, and
that existing pay, grading and promotion structures encourage equality
issues being seen as minority or sectional interests, is still apt.3
Although Fryer et al. (1978) previously raised this issue by pointing to
the lack of facilities for female shop stewards, the idea that organizational
cultures are gendered has only recently been applied to trade unions (see
Cunnison and Stageman 1995; Ledwith and Colgan 1996). The dominance
of men in unions led to what Pocock (1997: 10) terms `an assimilationist
approach' to women. Concepts of women's deficiencies have often under-
pinned union analysis and action in relation to the `problem of women' in
unions. Responses to women's under-representation have been constructed
around assumptions about women's low levels of knowledge, skills,
confidence, and their lack of interest in unionism. Increasing attention is
now being paid to the difficulties placed in the path of women seeking
leadership positions in male-dominated organizations. For example, the
majority of women full-time officers surveyed by Heery and Kelly (1989)
reported that they had been discriminated against both by lay members and
by fellow male full-time officers. Indeed, 51 per cent complained of sexual
harassment from fellow male officers, only marginally fewer than had
complained about harassment from the male rank and file. Women's
experience of the male culture of unions, as well as their location in the
labour market, need to be more fully researched and considered in any
explanation of women's unionization.
It is disappointing that most of the recent debate about union renewal in
the UK fails to engage with even the traditional differences between women
and men acknowledged by industrial relations scholars, let alone raising
the issues that I have outlined here (Darlington 1994; Fairbrother 1996).
Kelly's important book on mobilization and collectivism is a missed
opportunity in this respect. He convincingly argues that academic industrial
relations should `redirect our attention away from bargaining structures and
institutions and towards the social processes of industrial relations' (Kelly
1998: 38), thereby placing analyses of power and injustice in the workplace
at the core. Yet his discussion of how individuals with a sense of injustice
coalesce into a social movement takes no account of power inequalities
between the sexes and the way in which such inequalities are increas-
ingly perceived as illegitimate. The possibility that the labour movement
might have something to learn from the women's movement is not even
considered.
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190 British Journal of Industrial Relations
5. Sex and skill: making a job of gender
The failure of many industrial relations academics to engage with explana-
tions of the sexual division of labour may lie in their reluctance to acknowl-
edge the role played by unions in institutionalizing women's subordinate
position in the work-force. Standard accounts of the historical evolution of
British trade unions seldom included the less than glorious record of union
efforts on behalf of women (Lane 1974). There has been an unwillingness,
when lauding unions as the collective voice of democratic participation at
work, to recognize that they have functioned to represent sectional interests,
often at the expense of their female members. The historical exclusion of
women from some areas of work was not simply the result of management
preferences but was actively pursued by male trade unionists (Walby 1983).4
Craft workers, typically seen as the defenders of working-class interests
in disputes over technical change, resisted the entry of women to skilled
technical jobs in order to protect their own conditions.
Extensive feminist research has demonstrated that the craft system created
the unskilled worker, and that this process of differentiation between kinds
of worker involved both technological and ideological elements (Bradley
1989; Milkman 1987). Cockburn's (1983) study shows how printers per-
ceived clashes over technological innovation not only as affecting the
balance of power between capital and labour, but also as an aspect of gender
power. The compositors' craft involved the construction of an identity both
as skilled workers and as men. The two elements were inextricably linked.
They experienced the move to computerized typesetting technologies as an
affront to their masculinity and they organized against it as though their
virility depended on it.
Analysis of the relationship between skilled work, technology and mascu-
linity has provided a number of valuable insights. It has helped illuminate
that control over the labour process does not operate independently of
the gender of the workers who are being controlled. Both employers as
employers and men as men have an interest in creating and sustaining
occupational sex segregation. Gender is shown time and time again to be an
important factor in shaping the organization of work that results from
technological change (Cockburn 1983; MacKenzie and Wajcman 1999).
Further, men's traditional monopoly of technology has been identified as
key to maintaining the definition of skilled work as men's work. The associ-
ation between technology, masculinity and the very notion of what constitutes
skilled work is still fundamental to the way in which the gender division of
labour is being reproduced today. Machine-related skills and physical strength
are basic measures of masculine status and self-esteem, and by implication
the least technical jobs are suitable for women. The result is that machinery
is literally designed by men with men in mind Ð the masculinity of the
technology becomes embedded in the technology itself (see Wajcman 1991).
This is not to imply that the basis for distinctions of skill in women's and
men's work is simply a technical matter. The gender stereotyping of jobs has
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Feminism Facing Industrial Relations 191
remained stable even when the nature of work and the skills required have
been radically transformed. Industrial relations writing is beginning to
comprehend more fully that definitions of skill can have as much to do
with ideological and social constructions as with technical competencies.
Research on job evaluation schemes, where, for example, responsibility for
money or equipment is rated more highly than responsibility for people,
demonstrates the difficulties of producing a gender-neutral system (Liff
1995: 478; Steinberg 1992). The key point is that it is not only people who
are gendered. Jobs themselves and the organizations in which they are
located are gendered, too.
The gender-blindness of labour process theory was evident in the
literature on flexible specialization (Pollert 1988) and can be found in
recent discussions of the adoption of new production arrangements, such
as just-in-time management and total quality control. As Jenson (1989)
notes, enthusiasts of small groups, job rotation and employee involvement
are often unaware of the differential impact that these new management
techniques will have on women. It is men who are most likely to be found in
occupations where management may become convinced of the high-quality
strategy. Women, by contrast, are more likely to be found in occupations
defined as low skilled where management continues to feel that competition
on costs is the most viable option. This is confirmed by a recent cross-
national comparison of the food industry, which found that the restructur-
ing of work and skills increased the marginalization of women, reinforcing
gender cleavage (Flecker et al. 1998; see also Wood 1986). The lower-quality
upskilling experienced by women and their lower degree of involvement
than men in performance management systems may well be leading to a
gender gap in the quality of performance (White 1999). Pre-existing rela-
tionships of men and women to skilled labour and technology mediate the
effects of new forms of work organization.
Indeed, it is seldom acknowledged in the literature that teamwork may
exacerbate problems of difference. Teams often constitute themselves around
notions of `fitting in', making it difficult to include workers who are
ethnically, racially or sexually different. `Where the practices of Fordism
de-emphasised differentiation among workers to some extent, uniting them
by the moving line, stress on co-operation, consultation and planning can
make it seem compelling to find ``pals'' with whom one feels comfortable'
(Jenson 1989: 154). Accordingly, sexual difference may become a powerful
limit to the development of mixed-sex work-groups. That men prefer the
company of other men of a similar ilk is as true of managers as it is of
employees, and it is to this institution that I now turn.
6. The gender relations of management
Up to this point I have stressed the role of unions in the systematic
undervaluing of women's work and women's skills. This is clearly only part
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192 British Journal of Industrial Relations
of the story. Employers' perceptions of the suitability of women and men for
different types of work are even more influential. Managers, who design
jobs and do the hiring, make an initial determination about whether a job is
a `woman's' or `man's'. Differential recruitment and promotion practices
are common, grounded in assumptions about whether a job is best filled by
a man or woman (Collinson et al. 1990; Curran 1988). Informal and implicit
criteria of acceptability are extensively used in the selection process, with
behavioural and social skills being judged by individual recruiting managers.
The dominant stereotype of managerial work itself is suffused with mascu-
line images. Success means being lean, mean, aggressive and competitive with
tough, forceful leaders. In my study of senior managers (Wajcman 1998),
interviewees cited visibility together with networks and acceptability as the
most crucial factors in their career success. The gendered dimensions of
these criteria were clear, not only in the literal existence of the old boy
network, but also more subtly in the difficulties women had in making the
`right impact'. Familiar cliches that describe women as `pushy' while men `show
initiative' indicate that the assessment and reward of ability and perform-
ance of women managers continues to be seen through a gendered lens.
Industrial relations research hitherto has paid insufficient attention to
the informal cultural practices of organizations. A gendered analysis of
these dynamics helps to understand the persistence of sex discrimination
in employment, despite a framework of legal equality and widespread
commitment to equal opportunities. Unravelling the fabric of male
behaviour including men's resistance to sex equality goes some way to
accounting for the difficulties in putting equal opportunity policies into
practice. As Dickens (1994: 228) argues, `there is a template for employment
shaped around the typical circumstances of white, able-bodied men, within
organizations where the culture, norms, values, notions of merit, formal and
informal structures all reflect their attributes, needs, work and life patterns.'
There is a growing literature, from sociologists, management and
organization theorists, that argues that gender relations are constitutive of
the structure and practices of organizations and that this is key to under-
standing how men define and dominate organizations (Acker 1990; Hearn
and Parkin 1987; Savage and Witz 1992). Gendered processes operate on
many institutional levels, from the open and explicit to more discrete forms
that are submerged in organizational decisions, even those that appear to
have nothing to do with gender. They include the way men's influence
is embedded in rules and procedures, in formal job definitions, and in
functional roles as well as in everyday interactions. Through such cultural
representations and meanings, people build their understandings of the
gendered structure of work and opportunities. Organizations are one area
in which images of masculinity and femininity and subjective gender
identities are made and remade.
Questions of sexuality and the body at work have been relatively un-
explored in the study of employment relations. Sexualized social relations,
including sexual harassment, sexual banter and heterosexual flirtation, are
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Feminism Facing Industrial Relations 193
a normal rather than exceptional part of the functioning of hierarchical
organizations. For example, Hearn and Parkin (1987) have pointed to the
ways in which male managers use sexuality, harassment, joking and abuse as
routine means of maintaining authority. Men sexualize and objectify women
in order to maintain women's subordination within organizations. Their use
of women as sexual currency stresses the solidarity of men as well as men's
difference from women.
The shift from manufacturing to service sector employment has lent some
urgency to these debates. It has become fashionable to argue that service or
`front-line' work changes the very nature of work because the quality of the
service provision is so intimately related to the personal qualities and social
skills of the service providers (Urry 1990; Du Gay 1996). Although claims
for the uniqueness of this sector are rather exaggerated, a growing number
of these jobs require the supposedly feminine qualities of serving and caring.
These new forms of labour have been variously theorized as `emotional
labour' (Hochschild 1983), `sexual labour' (Adkins 1995) and `aesthetic
labour' or `body work' (Tyler and Abbott 1998). Indeed, case studies such
as those by Casey (1995), Jackall (1988) and Kunda (1992) indicate that
self-presentation and interpersonal skills have become central to the job
performance of managers and professionals in post-bureaucratic organ-
izations. However, these authors do not explore the extent to which their
male subjects are constrained by hegemonic masculinities that require them
to behave within predetermined parameters.
The feminization of service work has specific implications for women
because their physical appearance and `personality' are increasingly an
implicit part of the employment contract. An illustration is the requirement
imposed on female, but not male, flight attendants to weigh in periodically
during routine grooming checks in order to maintain a strict weight±height
ratio (Tyler and Abbott 1998). The enforcement of weight control by the
airline industry leads to `enforced' dieting in pursuit of the thin ideal body.
This aesthetic labour or body work, like emotional and sexual labour, is an
integral part of the `effort bargain' (see Forrest 1998). Yet it is not recog-
nized or remunerated, because it is seen as what women are rather than
what women do. Our analysis of the employment relationship can only be
strengthened by reflecting more extensively on culture, gender identity and
sexuality in organizations. In particular, those interested in the gender equality
implications of increasingly complex selection and appraisal techniques and
performance-related pay need to be more sensitive to the gender bias inherent
in judgements about the way jobs are performed (Rubery 1995; Dickens 1998).
7. The sexual contract
Just as women's gender work on the job is outside the normal scope of
inquiry of industrial relations, so too is women's daily unpaid work within
the household.5 Although it is now commonplace to note that we cannot
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194 British Journal of Industrial Relations
understand the position of women and men in the labour market, nor their
experience of work, without considering the salience of family life, few
studies of employment actually do this even outside industrial relations.
Most studies still show little consciousness of life `beyond the factory gates'.
While the resilience of occupational segregation and the gender pay gap
receive considerable attention, the fact that the sex segregation of domestic
labour has hardly altered is rarely mentioned in this context.
There has been much discussion about the European Working Time
Directive and the need to change Britain's long hours culture (Hall and
Sisson 1997). However, the focus is usually on shortening the working week
rather than the working day. This is a denial of women's experience in a
number of ways. Most obviously, it denies the fact that most women work
part-time, and that many may wish to work longer hours. Further, the fact
that it is women in full-time employment who work the longest hours
because of the unpaid household work they do is seldom recognized. For
women and men, a reduction in the length of the working day is what is
needed to accommodate family and domestic responsibilities. Research has
repeatedly confirmed that, for all men's protestation about aspiring to an
egalitarian marital partnership, on average, wives still do approximately
two-thirds of unpaid domestic work (Layte 1999: 36).
Feminist theory has provided a more thoroughgoing critique of the divide
between work and home, and the public and the private, by arguing that the
capitalist labour market is itself fundamentally structured by patriarchal
relations within the family (Pateman 1988). Indeed, full-time work has
become the norm only because it developed around male patterns of work
and behaviour. Like the employment contract itself, industrial relations
presupposes the `sexual contract' and still assumes that the standard worker
is male. Men and women do not enter the labour market on the same terms.
Women enter the workplace defined as family-oriented persons, with their
wage labour power diminished by domestic work, whereas when men enter
the workplace they are stripped of any domestic identity. Men are in a
privileged position to contract out their labour power because the marriage
contract frees them from domestic responsibility. Indeed, the employment
contract presupposes this sexual contract.
The notion of the sexual contract applies in two senses. First, in the literal
sense, it refers to the empirical situation whereby becoming and functioning
as an employee or a worker requires domestic servicing, or, to put it simply,
a wife. The managerial and professional career is a particularly telling example
of the dependence of men upon their wives' domestic labour because it
requires long hours, geographical mobility, considerable preparation for
public participation and high standards within the home. Indeed, managers
with working wives earn less than their counterparts with non-working
wives (Hotchkiss and Moore 1999). The long and unpredictable hours, shift
work and intense physical demands imposed by employers on working-class
men also rely on the fact that someone else is taking care of their family's
physical and emotional needs.
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Feminism Facing Industrial Relations 195
More metaphorically, the notion of the sexual contract refers to the ways
in which it is a premiss built into the fabric of the labour market itself. The
social construction of `jobs' already has within it the assumption that
workers will be men and that these men will have wives to take care of their
daily needs. Whatever women do to offload their domestic work, they are
still defined in domesticity in a way that men are not. What is problematized
at work is women's relation to the domestic sphere. `This is what women
are to most men (and to most women): people who have domestic ties'
(Cockburn 1991: 76). Crucially, the stigma of motherhood affects all women,
whether or not they are married and whether or not they have children. As
referred to earlier, employers' perceptions of employees' domestic circum-
stances affect recruitment and promotion practices. It is no accident that
much of women's paid work mirrors their domestic roles.
Moreover, part-time jobs, with wages below adult subsistence, are explicitly
designed around the notion that women's wages are a supplement to the
family income. Although the male-breadwinner household is now in the
minority, the concept of the family wage lingers on in social policy.
Feminists have long argued that the welfare state reflects and entrenches
gender roles and the division of women's lives into public and private
spheres (see Lewis 1992; O'Connor et al. 1999). Since the 1970s there has
been a gradual shift from the traditional breadwinner model of welfare state
provision to a gender-neutral model in which both men and women are
encouraged to form enduring attachments to the labour force, and which
confers benefit entitlements on an individual basis. This transformation is
by no means complete, so that policy assumptions based on the principle
of a male breadwinner family coexist with policies that recognize gender
equality and individual social rights. The point is that the state plays a key
role in establishing norms in employment and wages policy. Studies of paid
work need to be attuned to the gendered dimensions of these social policy
regimes.
8. Conclusion
Gender is now a significant if understudied theme in the field of British
industrial relations. However, there has been a tendency to conflate studies
of women with gender analysis. A gender analysis of industrial relations is
not simply about adding `women's issues' to the list of research topics, or
noting the impact of industrial relations systems on women. Rather, it
involves examining the gendered character of work for men and women, as
well as the major institutions involved. Although sex segregation in the
labour market is now a mainstream topic in industrial relations, analyses
of this phenomenon have tended to be descriptive rather than explanatory.
There has been increasing consciousness of the tendency to treat workers as
male, but without a deeper understanding of the way power inequalities
between men and women shape employment relations. As a result, the
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196 British Journal of Industrial Relations
gender effects of processes internal to the labour market have been neglected.
Such an analysis would add to our understanding not only of the character
of women's employment, but also of men's.
It is argued here that management, trade unions and the state are insti-
tutions which contribute to the gendering process. Institutionalized sex
discrimination takes place both at the level of the formal structure of
organizations and at the more subtle cultural level. Organizations are
fundamentally constituted by cultures, and the informal norms and every-
day cultural practices of organizations are rarely gender-neutral. This
insight applies equally to trade unions and management conceived of as
organizations. We need to be sensitive to the way organizations embody the
taken-for-granted habits and customs of men in order to understand how
women can experience them as a foreign territory. Whereas masculine
identity has traditionally been confirmed at work, femininity has been less
so. For this reason, genuine equality of opportunity requires more than
formal policies.
More profoundly, the argument here is that the workplace and the labour
market cannot be understood in isolation from the private sphere of the
household and the labour of social reproduction that goes on there. It has
long been argued within feminist theory that a dual-systems theory that
treats capitalism and patriarchy as separate systems is inadequate. The very
nature of jobs and the organization of the labour market are intimately tied
to the nature of gender relations within the family. In other words, the
employment contract presupposes the sexual contract. The point is that a
gender analysis is as relevant to the design of male full-time jobs as it is to
female part-time jobs. As Beechey and Perkins (1987: 146) confirmed in their
research, `there is nothing inherent in the nature of particular jobs which
makes them full time or part time. They have been constructed as such, and
such constructions are closely related to gender.' Gender is an integral part
of industrial relations analysis, whether one is considering the acquisition of
skills and access to employment, manufacturing v. services, the nature of
collective bargaining, the impact of technology on the restructuring of work
and skills, the links between production and consumption (whether it be
cars or washing machines), how social policy interacts with employment and
wages policy, debates about working time or prospects for union renewal.
Moreover, a feminist perspective is a useful one from which to contem-
plate how industrial relations as a field is conceptualized. Male priorities
and privilege have shaped the research agenda. The iconic status of the
automobile worker bears witness to this. Industrial relations needs to follow
the lead of the trade union movement which has realized, if belatedly, that
it marginalizes women at its peril. The changing realities of the workplace
and industrial life lend urgency to this task. Developments along the lines
I advocate are taking place. Yet there are disturbing signs that enthusiasts
of the new industrial relations, with its emphasis on new production
arrangements and skill enhancement, may be reproducing the gender-
blindness of earlier studies. An approach that keeps both women and men in
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Feminism Facing Industrial Relations 197
view, and pays sufficient attention to the nature and operation of mascu-
linized institutions, will enrich future industrial relations research.
Final version accepted 22 December 1999.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Linda Dickens, Paul Edwards, Paul Marginson, Jill
Rubery, Jeremy Waddington, Stephen Wood and the anonymous referees
for commenting on an earlier version of this article.
Notes
1. For the purposes of this review, I have chosen to focus on `core' industrial
relations publications rather than encompassing, for example, the field of human
resource management. See Dickens (1998) for a discussion of the gender-blindness
of HRM. Also, I acknowledge that industrial relations scholars do contribute to
publications such as the sociology journal Work, Employment and Society, within
which gender is now accepted as an essential analytical category.
2. Edwards and Gilman (1999) provide a good example of how a gender analysis can
enhance our understanding of the impact of the National Minimum Wage.
3. This in no way diminishes the importance of collective bargaining for gender
equality, as evidenced by the fact that women who are represented by a union
enjoy better terms and conditions than those who are not (Booth 1995; Colling
and Dickens 1998: 393±4).
4. For example, the deployment of women during wartime to perform many jobs for
which they had previously been deemed unsuitable, and their subsequent removal,
was often facilitated by trade union agreements (Summerfield 1989; Glucksmann
1990).
5. I presume that one no longer has to justify the treatment of housework as `real'
work, as even the UN regularly estimates its worth of GNP (see Goldschmidt-
Clermont and Pagnossin-Aligisakis 1995). For discussion of different forms of
work see also Moore (1995).
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