After a period of great flourishing, the union movement saw the foundations of its power shaken from the mid-1970s onwards, entering a generalised crisis. Some authors have emphasised that the rise of women to leadership positions has made a very important contribution to change the way unionism is done: in ideologies, programmes and agendas (Pasture, 1997); in union’s practices, as women have a “different leadership style” (Cunnison & Stageman, 1995); in denouncing the rigidity, rituals, the accumulation of responsibilities, and in the adoption of collective working methods (Le Quentrec et al., 1999); and in creating a union’s "friendly image" (Cockburn, 1991), what is strategic for reversing union decline (Kirton & Healy, 1999). Moving from the real world to the virtual one, our aim is to analyse how the Internet is used by female-dominated and male-dominated unions. Do unions where there is a very high rate of feminisation of the leadership use the Internet differently from male-dominated ones? To what extent are there divergences or convergences in the way they use it? We analysed the online content (website and social media) of four unions (two female-dominated and two male-dominated) in the education and health sectors. Our main conclusion is that there is no gender effect, but rather a broad convergence in the way unions communicate. On the other hand, the way the Internet is being used is not contributing to the emergence of new forms of action and politics, thus not allowing the revitalisation of trade unionism.

--