Gender democracy in trade unions

Anne McBride, Ashgate Publishing Limited, 202 pages, hardback, £39.95

Public services union UNISON was the first union to adopt a comprehensive range of strategies to raise the representation and participation of women.

This thorough book examines the success of this strategy. It finds that the "proportionality" strategy UNISON adopted to get women into decision making structures in proportion to their constituents has offered a way of empowering individual women in a union structure. However, it reveals a number of bureaucratic and political pitfalls.

The book also examines the strategy for women's self-organisation in the union.

This is a rather detailed and complicated analysis but should prove useful to those at the forefront of fashioning a less male-dominated union movement.