Despite women’s increasing participation in labour markets, many occupations and sectors remain strongly male-dominated. Ports and logistics, transport, construction,
mining, manufacturing, engineering, energy, maritime work and other traditionally masculinised occupations continue to be organised around gendered assumptions concerning physical strength, availability, technical competence, authority and commitment to work. Women’s entry into these workplaces does not necessarily dismantle their gendered organisation. Instead, it may generate new forms of inclusion and exclusion, while also challenging established labour processes, workplace hierarchies, occupational identities and forms of worker organisation.
This special stream proposes to examine women’s experiences in male-dominated workplaces through a labour process perspective. It seeks to explore how the organisation and control of work, workplace regimes, technologies, skill, employment relations and occupational power are shaped by gender, and how women’s incorporation may reproduce, negotiate or transform established workplace relations and masculine occupational cultures. The stream will bring together research on women’s access to male-dominated occupations, their everyday position within labour processes and their individual and collective responses to gender inequalities. Particular attention will be paid to the tension between formal occupational inclusion and substantive equality. Even where women gain access to previously closed occupations, gender inequalities may be reproduced through task allocation, systems of training and skill recognition, promotion and recruitment practices, working-time arrangements, informal workplace hierarchies and unequal access to positions of authority and worker representation.
Rather than understanding women only as subjects of exclusion or discrimination, the stream will also focus on their agency within the labour process. We are particularly interested in how women negotiate managerial control and occupational norms, develop informal and collective forms of resistance, participate in trade unions and workplace representation, create networks of solidarity, and challenge gendered definitions of skill, authority and occupational belonging. The stream will also examine how gender intersects with class, ethnicity, migration status, age, sexuality, disability and contractual position. An intersectional labour process perspective can reveal how different groups of women are positioned within workplace hierarchies and employment regimes, and how these positions shape their capacity for individual and collective agency.
We particularly welcome papers addressing topics such as:
- Managerial control, labour discipline and women’s everyday negotiations of workplace authority.
- Technological, organisational and digital change and their effects on gendered labour processes and occupational power.
- Trade unions, workplace representation and women’s participation in traditionally male collective organisations.
- Individual and collective forms of resistance to gendered workplace practices and managerial control.
- Women’s workplace networks, informal solidarity and collective organising in male-dominated occupations.
- Labour disputes, strikes and collective mobilisation involving women in traditionally male workplaces.
- Changes in workplace power relations following women’s incorporation into male-dominated occupations.
- Women’s entry into traditionally male occupations and the transformation or reproduction of occupational closure.
- Gendered labour processes and the allocation of tasks, shifts, responsibilities, skills and positions of authority.
- Masculine workplace cultures, occupational identities and informal mechanisms of workplace control.
- Gendered constructions of skill, physical capacity, technical competence and occupational legitimacy.
- Restructuring, subcontracting, precarisation and differentiated employment statuses within male-dominated workplaces.
- Working-time, availability requirements and the gendered organisation of reproduction and care.
- Harassment, discrimination and informal exclusion as mechanisms for maintaining gendered workplace hierarchies.
The stream addresses an important but still insufficiently explored issue within labour process research: the persistence and transformation of gender relations in workplaces historically organised around male workers and masculine occupational cultures. It will strengthen dialogue between feminist approaches and labour process theory by placing the organisation and control of work, skill, occupational power, worker agency and collective resistance at the centre of the analysis. The proposal also aims to broaden the ILPC audience by attracting scholars from feminist sociology, gender and work studies, industrial relations, trade union studies, organisational sociology, migration and intersectionality, while maintaining a clear focus on labour processes and workplace power relations. It will welcome established and early-career researchers and qualitative, ethnographic, comparative and longitudinal approaches. A further objective is to promote international collaboration across different sectors and institutional contexts, encouraging contributions from Europe, Latin America, Africa, Asia and other regions. The stream will provide a basis for future comparative research, collaborative publications and international panels. The organisers will circulate the call through relevant academic networks and select abstracts according to relevance, theoretical contribution, methodological quality and their capacity to generate comparative dialogue, in coordination with the ILPC 2027 organisers.