Advocating for equality: business case or social justice? Conflicts of gender knowledge between trade unions and management in large French companies

Internationally and nationally – although to different degrees – large companies have deployed business case arguments for investment in inclusion and diversity. This programme of equality or proportionate representation of women in decision-making can be seen as narrow or moderate, compared to a broader agenda of social justice, including redistributive wage strategies, pursued by trade unions, which often also link gender to social class. The European Commission has long advocated collective bargaining as a means of narrowing pay gaps within organisations, but progress in reducing gender pay gaps has stalled since 2008. Our analysis, based on a wider study of collective agreements on gender equality in France and illustrated by two organisational case studies in the information technology sector, shows how employers and trade unions deploy different forms of ‘gender knowledge’, which shape the way in which information on pay gaps is collected and analysed and in which it forms the basis for action. Within the domestic context of state-managed collective bargaining, sectoral and local power relations determine the outcome of the negotiations.