Experiencing mergers: A woman's eye view

This paper looks at mergers with an explicit gender focus to see if and how mergers are or might be gendered. Little previous work has examined the impact of mergers on employees, as opposed to on management. Of the work that has studied the impact of mergers on workers, none has taken a gender focus. This paper seeks to correct both oversights and bring the experience of women workers center stage in the analysis of mergers. The paper also argues for a “bottom-up” examination of mergers rather than the “top-down” examination that exists in the literature. It does this by drawing on qualitative longitudinal and case study data of research conducted in eight EU countries between 1999 and 2001.