a key role within the welfare system (for French or Italian trade unions, indeed,
this function may be more important than collective bargaining with employers).
As a corollary, in such countries ‘industrial relations’ encompasses social policy
much more generally than where a liberal welfare regime prevails.
The gender regimeTraditionally, writers on industrial relations and employment practices have
regarded the worker in unisex terms: gender relations have been considered
irrelevant to the workplace. But increasingly, it has become recognised that the
gender regime has to be incorporated in the analysis of the world of work.
Economic theory may be gender-blind, but in practice a powerful sexual divi-
sion of labour is universal. In most countries of the world, the predictions of
writers like Marx that female labour would become central to the evolution of
capitalist production were not borne out in the century after he wrote his studies.
On the contrary, there emerged a stark polarisation between the male ‘bread-
winner’ and the female ‘housewife’, at least after the age of marriage and child-
bearing: a division indicated in most countries by a sharp contrast between the
proportions of women and men in the ‘active’ labour force (Gorner, 1999;
Rubery, 1992).
But here too, different national capitalisms display very different patterns.
Within any country there are many factors which either reinforce or counter-
act the ‘breadwinner/housewife’ division. One of the most important is the
extent of employment in public services, since these perform functions tradi-
tionally assigned to women within the household, enabling more to enter the
external labour force. The outcome is not necessarily egalitarian; in Sweden, for
example, viewed by many as a model of sexual equality at work, employment
in public services is overwhelmingly female (a system for collectivising domes-
tic labour, perhaps?) while most higher-wage manufacturing industries are
overwhelmingly male. Another important issue in the gender regime is the
unit of welfare entitlement within social protection: ‘household’ or individual.
‘Household’ systems tend to reinforce the ‘breadwinner/housewife’ division;
individual systems may support greater sexual equality (though perhaps
increasing inequality between income groups) (Lewis, 1992; Sainsbury, 1999).
Gender issues are more directly involved in the employment system. Skill
classifications may be gender-biased; the treatment of part-time employment
in terms of promotion opportunities and social entitlements may implicitly
discriminate against women; career trajectories may be biased against women
who interrupt their employment for child-rearing; to the extent that domestic
responsibilities are typically distributed unequally between women and
men, many women have to manage a double burden of commitments which
may be partially mitigated where genuinely ‘family-friendly’ policies are imple-
mented. Finally, an important issue is the extent to which gender issues are
416 International Human Resource Management