Democratic ideals and gendered realities: women’s experiences in worker cooperatives

Democracy is often celebrated as the most equitable form of governance. Yet, feminist critiques have long highlighted its structural blind spots, particularly regarding gender equality. This paper explores how democratic principles are experienced by women within cooperatives. These organizations claim to embody democratic and egalitarian values. Using a phenomenological approach and combining semi-structured interviews with photo elicitation, the study investigates the lived experiences of women in Belgian worker cooperatives. The findings reveal a complex interplay between formal democratic structures and informal, often invisible, gendered dynamics. While cooperatives offer spaces for participation and shared governance, they also reproduce certain inequalities, particularly through emotional labor and implicit norms. This research contributes to broader debates on democracy and gender by foregrounding the relational, affective, and embodied dimensions of democratic practice. It calls for a rethinking of democracy that is attentive to care, power asymmetries, and the lived realities of those who enact it daily.