Gender and scientific management – Women and the history of the International Institute for Industrial Relations, 1922‐1946

The relationship between the women’s reform movement and scientific management has been neglected because secondary literature has focussed primarily on class relations rather than on gender. Moreover, the neutral‐sounding formulations of scientific management discourse and the diversification of the women’s activism after suffrage has obscured linkages between both movements. Through the case study of the International Institute of Industrial Relations, through which many women reformers of different stripes found each other, the author argues that scientific management had a special appeal for women reformers and should prompt a reconsideration of the connections between gender and the scientific management movement.