Abstract
This article captures the shared understanding in the literature of labour law’s interaction with gender, distinguishing between law’s different functions – constituting labour market institutions, sustaining them, addressing unwarranted outcomes and transforming the institutions. Constituted, in part, by law, the standard employment relationship and the institutions of formal employment have segmenting gendered effects. While legal norms designed to correct these effects are important, they also sustain them. The authors argue for a transformative alternative that would follow two general principles in designing new labour standards, namely, universalization of scope and adaptive content in the interests of differently situated women and men.