Gender and Leadership in Unions edited by Gill Kirton and Geraldine Healy (eds) Routledge, 2013, 300 pp., ISBN: 978‐0415887045, £80 (HK)

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/irj.12074
• Author: Jane Parker
• Published date: 01 November 2014
• Date: 01 November 2014

Gender and Leadership in Unions

Gill Kirton and Geraldine Healy (eds)

Routledge, 2013, 300 pp., ISBN: 978-0415887045, £80 (HK)

This welcome collection responds to the increasing feminisation of workplaces and

trade unions, focusing on the United Kingdom and United States. It covers a wide

terrain: women’s situation at work and in unions; links between union democracy and

leadership; paths to female union leadership; women leaders, power and union trans-

formation; women’s separate organising in unions; and female leadership develop-

ment in a globalised context.

In the introductory chapter, the editors establish that much mainstream industrial

relations (IR) class-based scholarship continues to largely treat the male worker’s

experience as the norm. Female invisibility is attributed to the ‘still influential’ systems

approach that informs many studies to the exclusion of how community, family and

work issues coincide and become problematic for all workers. This leads to a call for

‘a wider interpretation of what counts as IR research’ (p. 4). Unsurprisingly, women’s

‘hiddenness’ is also seen to extend to IR policy and practice. Ideologically, the union

movement’s pursuit of class-based solidarity jars with fragmentation within the

working class in reality, based on skill and gender difference. Though women’s

representation in union leadership has slowly increased, the unions still appear to

labour under a ‘say-do gap’ in terms of inclusiveness and representation. To better

understand this, the UK–US research team mobilised for this collection utilised

interviews and focus groups with paid and lay female union leaders, and facilitated an

exchange of 10 US and 10 UK female union leaders. The primary research is a

strength of the book and (together with the two-country comparative focus) provides

cohesion.

The book is organised so that the second and third chapters provide the necessary

contextualisation and conceptual ballast. By now, the reader is primed and keen to

learn more about the study findings. Subsequent chapters explore the motivations for

joining unions and paths to leadership in which the drive of women in the face of

competing pressures and insufficient support (including training) comes to the fore;

the distinctive leadership styles that female leaders tend to employ; and their contri-

bution to union transformation. As noted above, a forté of these and other chapters

is the extent to which they are directly informed by participant voices. Similarities and

differences between the United Kingdom and United States are also developed in the

analysis. One similarity concerns how women leaders in both countries recognise that

gender consciousness and lived experiences as women have both positive and negative

impacts on leadership. However, reflecting the business unionism orientation in the

United States, women leaders there adopt an instrumental service model of ‘bread and

butter’ unionism; in the United Kingdom, senior women leaders’ approach is said to

convey a more ‘ideologically-based empowerment model’. Tentative conclusions

about the implications of differences in the approaches for union goals (e.g. around

diversifying the leadership to accurately reflect the rank and file) point to an area for

further scholarship.

The issue of separate organising within unions is also explored by McKay and

Kirton. This can be regarded as a means to union transformation and/or other goals

(e.g. providing a safe space for women’s development) and not necessarily an effort

towards separatism per se. The authors find that women’s groups and committees are

564 Jane Parker

© 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd