Policy Developments for Workplace Gender Equity in a Global Era: The Importance of the EU in the UK

This article asks whether attempts to achieve gender equity in the workplace are limited by globalization. On the one hand, globalization has been seen to curtail ambitions for equity in employment because of the increased power of global capital as compared with labor, including within the state. On the other hand, there are two counter tendencies. One is the modernization of the gender regime, which has restructured gender inequalities and developed new political constituencies among women, and the other is the development of new polities, in particular the European Union, in response to the perceived challenge of globalization. I investigate the impact of these crosscutting changes on policies aimed at gender equity in the workplace in the UK. I consider data on changes in gender equity in the workplace and developments in employment policy, especially increased education and the changing regulation of working time and equal opportunities policies. The article concludes that globalization does not lead to the weakening of all polities, that the EU has become increasingly powerful in the context of globalization, and that despite the weakening of labor, the increased education of women and the increased articulation of women's political voices has led to improvements in some dimensions of the position of some women in employment.