ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that a gender lens has had four key impacts on the subject discipline. First, it has expanded the subject’s scope by going beyond the traditional embedding of workplace employment relations within product market, political and education and training institutions to include the family, welfare and gender relations. Second, a gender lens has extended the traditionally class-based focus on inequality and required the development of a multilayered and intersectional perspective on inequalities. Third, a gender lens has challenged the construction of customary pay hierarchies and working time arrangements, revealing the social construction of employment and working conditions. Fourth, research has revealed not only gender differences in experience of work but also how work itself involves ‘doing gender’. These contributions to the expansion and enrichment of the disciplinary field of employment relations reflects positively on the innovative and challenging nature of feminist scholarship. However, this success story is tempered by a continuing failure to develop an equally gendered analysis for men at work and by the tendency for gender still to be taken up primarily by female authors or only when the topic has a specific gender label.
