Convergence in Contestation: Mapping Gendered Power Across Industrial Relations Actors

The Australian construction sector employs one in ten workers and is politically contentious, economically vital, and socially significant, making it a critical site for understanding the exercise of power. Construction remains Australia's most male-dominated employment sector (ABS, 2025), with persistent gender inequality despite decades of reform initiatives. While existing research has documented barriers to women's participation and the failure of formal equality policies (Bridges et al., 2020), a critical gap remains in understanding how institutional actors shape and resist gender equality. This paper examines the gendered nature of construction's most powerful industrial relations stakeholders—trade unions and employer associations—to understand their role in perpetuating or challenging gender inequality. Drawing on feminist institutionalism (Galea 2018; Josefsson, 2024), this paper shifts analytical attention from women's disadvantage to the institutional resistance that protects male dominance. While contestation between these actors has historically centred on divergent ideologies, the paper interrogates: do these traditionally ideological opponents share more common ground as gendered actors than their competing industrial interests would suggest? Using mixed qualitative methods including a literature review, interviews, and documentary analysis, the paper examines how these organizations are gendered and whether this produces gendered logics that enable or constrain gender equality reform. It explores what is fundamentally at stake and what is and isn't gendered: their institutional power, membership bases, organizational identities, and influence over employment conditions. As gendered institutions, these stakeholders shape working conditions through advocacy, lobbying, tripartite forums, and enterprise bargaining, yet their capacity and willingness to advance gender equality remains underexamined. The paper contributes to understanding organizational mechanisms through which the gender status quo is maintained in male-dominated environments. It reveals how resistance to gender equality may be institutionalized not only through traditional inter-group contestation but through intra-organizational power differentials and the protection of masculine privilege across ideologically opposed actors. By examining the gendered nature of these powerful institutional actors, this research provides theoretical groundwork for understanding how industrial relations stakeholders engage with Australia's recent gender equality reforms, establishing critical insights into whether they serve as sites of resistance or potential catalysts for transformative change in construction's entrenched gender order.