Lei, Jianxuan. “Trade union membership and women’s right to work: From gender antagonism to inclusive solidarity?” Status: Revision requested at the ILR Review.
Abstract: The notion that women do not have the equal right to work as men underlies gender antagonism in early trade unionism. While unions have been increasingly promoting gender equality in the workplace, it remains unclear whether individual members’ attitudes towards women’s work have changed over time. In this study, I provide the first large-scale, comparative, and quantitative analysis of this question, focusing on more than 25,000 workers across 16 Western European countries from 1990 to 2020. The results suggest a complex picture. Specifically, in the early 1990s, union members did not differ significantly from non-members in their attitudes towards women’s right to work. Since the late 1990s, union members exhibited more egalitarian gender attitudes than non-members. However, by 2020, the union-nonunion gap in gender attitudes appeared to have vanished. Further analysis indicates that a breadwinner ideology, in which manhood is defined in relation to wage labor, is the primary driver for less egalitarian gender attitudes among union members. In addition, the dramatic uprisings of the populist right have possibly contributed to the vanished union-nonunion attitude gap by gendering contemporary European politics.