The Routledge Companion to Employment Relations

7

Employment relations and gender equality

Gail Hebson and Jill Rubery

Introduction

Gender equality has increasingly become a central theme of employment relations (ER) research. This is in itself an achievement. In 1995 one of the current authors pointed to the complete absence of any reference to women or female in the indexes of core industrial relations textbooks (Rubery and Fagan, 1995). The now commonplace inclusion of gender equality within ER research and teaching reflects a number of developments, including, of course, the rising number of women both in employment and as a share of trade union members. Growing female trade union membership has partially compensated for declining male membership and women now account for around 44 ...