Research
You will find a complete range of our monographs, muti-authored and edited works including peer-reviewed, original scholarly research across the social sciences and aligned disciplines. We publish long and short form research and you can browse the complete Bristol University Press and Policy Press archive.
Policy Press also publishes policy reviews and polemic work which aim to challenge policy and practice in certain fields. These books have a practitioner in mind and are practical, accessible in style, as well as being academically sound and referenced.
Books: Research
In recent years there has been significant improvement in the feminization of unions in both Great Britain and in France. Today, union membership generally reflects the presence of women in the labour market in these countries. However, this descriptive representation of women is not the result of a mechanical adjustment to the transformations of the labour market or the development of an ‘egalitarian conscience’ among unions. Large numbers of women moved into paid work between 1970 and 1990, but their union representation improved only in the 2000s (Boston, 2015; Kirton, 2015), thanks to the implementation of targeted recruitment strategies in highly feminized sectors and voluntarist equality policies within unions. In the UK, around 43% of women were in paid employment in 1987, but they represented only 29% of union members. Union representation increased over time, reaching 39% in 2000 and 48% in 2012. Today, the unionization of women has outpaced that of men (26.2% compared to 20.7% in 2018), like in other countries (Cooper, 2012; Milkman, 2016; Gavin et al, 2020). However, this feminization is variable between unions, depending on their size and sector (Kirton, 2015). In France, the rate of unionization is lower among women than men (10% compared to 12%) but, according to the most recent data, some unions, like the CFDT, have levels of women members that on average reflect the proportion of women employees. Other organizations in more traditionally male-dominated industrial sectors, like the CGT, or in occupations that are still male dominated (CFE-CGC), have lower levels of women members (see Table 1.2).
The feminization of unions is underway. It is selective and incomplete, but it is progressing. Many women union leaders describe themselves as feminists and actively defend internal equality policy. But what impact does this feminization have on the way women’s interests are represented in the workplace? Is having women unionists defending ‘women’s rights’ enough to actually advance gender equality? Research in political science has long considered that a ‘politics of presence’ (Phillips, 1995) was necessary to ensure that the concerns of women (as a group) were put on the political agenda. However, the supposed connection between descriptive and substantive representation (Pitkin, 1977) has been the subject of an extensive literature outlining the pitfalls of such an assumption (Campbell et al, 2010). Critics have pointed out the risk of naturalizing and unifying the definition of what constitutes ‘women’s interests’ as such. Scholars have also drawn attention to the distinct social characteristics of women in elected positions, their uneven propensity to formulate and represent the interests of (other) women, and the variations of this representation, depending on the institutional context (Mackay, 2010). Fiona Mackay (2010) contended that the relationship between descriptive representation of women and a better representation of women’s interests and preferences is not straightforward but would be better defined as ‘probabilistic’, complex, institutionally constructed, and variable, depending on the problem treated and the political context.
Substantive representation has therefore progressively become a research question, investigating a larger number of representatives acting in the name of women and looking into ‘critical actors’ (Childs and Krook, 2009).
This book explores the representation of women and their interests in the world of work across four trade unions in France and the UK.
Drawing on case studies of the careers of 100 activists and a longitudinal study of the trade unions' struggle for equal pay in the UK, it unveils the social, organizational, and political conditions that contribute to the reproduction of gender inequalities or, on the contrary, allow the promotion of equality.
Guillaume’s nuanced evaluation is a call to redefine the role of trade unions in the delivering of gender equality, contributing to broader debates on the effectiveness of equality policies and the enforcement of equality legislation.
In comparison with other academic fields, the underrepresentation of women and their interests in and by unions has attracted attention only relatively recently in France, with the exception of pioneering work on women’s strikes in sociology (Maruani, 1979; Borzeix and Maruani, 1982; Kergoat, 1982) and history (Guilbert, 1966; Perrot, 1974; Zylberberg-Hocquard, 1978; Auzias and Houel, 1982). Research in employment relations has long been criticized for its ‘classist obsession’ (Kirton and Healy, 2008), its institutional bias (Wajcman, 2000), and its lack of consideration for the gendered dynamics that characterize union representation and the labour market. Yet, as early as the 1980s, Sylvia Walby (1986) argued that trade unions were one of the three patriarchal institutions that intervene in gender relations in paid employment, the others being the state and employers. In both France and Great Britain an overview of the literature shows the clearly marginal place of women in the ‘classical’ study of industrial relations; when they are not literally left out of the analysis, women feature only as a descriptive variable, or are studied in relation to specific issues like equal pay, workplace discrimination, and sometimes organizing.
In the UK in the 1980s, work by socialist-feminist researchers on working-class women’s work led to a condemnation of the unions’ hostile attitude to women in traditional industries and raised the question of the underrepresentation of women and their interests more generally (Pollert, 1981; Glucksmann, 1982; Cockburn, 1983).
