Union Density and Women’s Relative Wage Gains

The drive to improve wages and working conditions which ac-companied the industrial revolutions in democratic countries has primarily been a men’s movement. In virtually all countries, the vast majority of strikes have been in industries in which men predominate and union leadership has tended to be a male prerogative. In part this is explicable in terms of the greater importance of wage work to men than to women since the early stages of the industrial revolution. In a number of countries women’s employment was crucial in the early stages of industrialisation, yet many women tended to see wage work as occupying brief periods in their lives rather than as a lifetime commitment.