Category: Mining
Mining Coal and Undermining Gender
In Mining Coal and Undermining Gender, anthropologist Jessica Smith Rolston provides a well-crafted and informative insight into gender relations and practices among mine workers in north-eastern Wyoming’s Powder River Basin. For anybody who has an interest in exploring the topic of gender in resource industries, this is an important read.
Mining Coal and Undermining Gender shows that it is possible to move beyond superficial thinking about gender diversity in mining. This is not a story about women who work in mining. It is not another polemic against the current (lack of) status for women in the mining industry or the hyper-masculine culture of this industry. It does not follow the usual response to discussing gender in mining by advocating for better diversity policies or more mentorship for women to gain the skills they need to work in mining. Women still only make up approximately 20 percent of the production crews in the Basin. But Smith Rolston aims to show how these women, and importantly the men they work alongside, do and redo gender in the everyday. Her account—a great example of how the personal can mix so well with the academic—offers an insight into a real gender culture at work. She shows us how the very specific gender culture on the mine sites of Wyoming’s Powder River Basin impacts on the people and the work being carried out there.
Key to Rolston Smith’s argument is that gender is being undone by the workers she has observed and worked alongside. The debate about whether gender can ever be undone or only ever redone is one that is well known and well discussed among gender theorists. A pervasive and restrictive barrier of gender essentialism argues for fixed, static, a-historical, a-cultural, and therefore unchangeable positions of gender. We have (it is hoped) moved through this somewhat, and it is now more widely accepted that gender can and does change. We know that gender changes across history and across cultures. We also see how it changes for us as individuals at different periods of our lives and depending on where we are and who we are with. Many gender theorists are still reluctant to claim, however, that gender can be undone. The importance of gender in our lives appears to make this an impossibility. Can we ever function and/or identify without gender? Don’t those who “change” gender in what may be seen to be more radical ways (e.g., transgender, intersex) only ever recreate new kinds of gender and therefore also redo gender; but they are never without gender?
Smith Rolston insists the undoing of gender is a reality for many people working in Wyoming’s Powder River Basin. She recognizes the reluctance to promote the possibility of undoing gender among leading gender theorists. She further recognizes that most ethnographic studies “prove the inescapable tyranny of binary gender difference” (p. 117). She uses her own ethnographic study however to argue for undoing gender as a real lived experience:
[…] I advance the debate about undoing gender by precisely documenting and theorizing the sometimes momentary, and at other times enduring, loss of accountability to differentiated gender norms. The ethnographic materials demonstrate that some of these cases were tentative and quickly quelled by the strong reassertion of difference; others were more durable and resistant to dispute; and in the most heavily contested contexts the construction of gender difference and similarity occurred on a moment-by-moment, turn-by-turn basis. Even when such moments of undoing gender are fleeting, their existence in the heart of an industry otherwise infamous for difference and discrimination calls for analytical attention.” (p. 117)
She is correct. Theoretically, we can and should imagine ways of living outside or without gender. We understand ourselves as gendered not because this is how we are, but because of the construction of our sense of identity within intensely powerful discourses and systems which speak to and about us with reference to gender. It is not unimaginable to expect that we could or would, therefore, experience moments of living that are not defined by gender or that do not define our gender. It’s questionable, however, as to whether this means we are undoing gender or simply experiencing momentary release from what are otherwise disciplining yet defining discourses and practices.
The findings of Smith Rolston’s extensive ethnographic study do require analytical attention. This is the aim of her book. But the analysis and the attention cannot stop there. I am not convinced that Rolston Smith has adequately shown that gender is undone. In her accounts of how her fellow miners do and redo gender, there is evidence of persistent gender disciplining going on. The men and women talk about other men and women as failing to be the kind of men and women who are preferred on their mine sites. The way Smith Rolston sees this happening challenges the dominant view of all people who work in mining as overly masculine. Instead, she argues that men who care and women who can get the job done are the ideal kinds of men and women in the workplaces she has studies and in which she has worked. Still, these are still examples of doing gender. They still show that the men and women seek to ensure gender is done in particular ways by men and by women.
Smith Rolston provide specific examples to promote the idea that gender doesn’t (always) matter for people who live and work in the Basin. Girls, for example, are expected to do all the heavy work just like the men. In part she explains this as a “natural” result of the experiences of growing up for women/girls who live on farms. But do the men also cook? And do the men also take on the responsibility of childcare? Is it enough to say that when a girl does what we might typically associate as a man’s job that she is undoing gender? Is gender really being undone when men show compassion for fellow workers and when women do what it takes to get the job done? I want to believe that Smith Rolston has it right—that gender can be undone. But I am not convinced by her position on this.
Her reading of the gender culture on the mines sites on which she has worked is perhaps influenced by her intense desire to present her subjects (miners) in a favourable light. Earlier on in the book, she makes it clear that she wants her story to challenge the stereotypes of people who work in mining. There is a sense throughout the entire book that she is determined to achieve this by always emphasising the ways in which the men and women she meets act differently to how they have been imagined or seen to behave on other mine sites. I agree with her that there is often a focus on the hyper-masculinity of the gender culture in mining, and that this leads many researchers to focus only on the typical and often negative aspects of such a culture, including the violence and the sexism. I agree with her that gender is done and redone in multiple and complex and often contradictory ways in mining. But she may move too far to the other side of the story in her account.
Her account of gender in mining book is alarmingly overtly silent on issues of sexuality and race. Homosexuality is only mentioned once and only very fleetingly in the book. The issues of race and ethnicity too barely get a mention. The intricate and intimate connections between race, sexuality, and gender cannot be ignored. What happens to gay men in the mine sites of Powder River Basin and how must these men do their gender to fit in, for example? Where are the non-white stories of doing and redoing gender on these same mine sites, and do these stories show a relationship with gender which challenges Smith Rolston’s main argument that gender is being done seemingly calmly among the workforce?
It would also be interesting to see how others (“Others”) who have a different gender position to the author read the gender culture of the same mine sites. Smith Rolston is the daughter of a miner. The culture she explores is, in many ways, her culture. It may be more difficult to tell stories that reflect badly on home and particularly on a place where she fits in. She may also be experiencing and reading the gender of this culture through her own gendered position—a personal subject position which is made clear in the book but is not unpacked or challenged.
The proximity of the industry and geographical location to the author’s own identity and experiences nevertheless result in what is essentially always meant to be a personal story about gender in mining. It makes for a great read. For anybody who has ever spent time on a mine site, the descriptions of the machinery and everyday business practices are not just represented with accuracy and welcome humor, but they also inspire feelings of longing to be there back with the dirt, the noise, and the people. Importantly, the book also offers a leap forward in showing how we can think about gender in mining by drawing on important literature in gender theory—something that is otherwise unfortunately missing in most thinking about gender that is done from within the industry.
This review was written by Dr. Dean Laplonge. Factive would like to thank Rutgers for supplying a review copy of the book.
Sexual Abuse in the Mining Industry
In March this year, it was reported that a woman was raped in the female changing rooms on a mine site operated by Anglo American Platinum in Rustenburg (South Africa). Is the sexual abuse of women in the mining industry commonplace? Are women at risk of being sexually abused because they work on a mine site?
Nancarrow et al. (2009) surveyed 532 women living in Central Queensland. At the time of the study, the region had a total of 48 coal mines either operational or under development; and all the women in the study were in a relationship with a man with 54.4 percent of the male partners employed in mining. The study discovered correlations between the women’s experiences of abuse and the specifics of their relationship, including the presence of children, rates of alcohol consumption by both partners, and the level of household debt. Overall there was little noticeable difference in the prevalence of intimate partner abuse among the women in the study when compared to the national statistics. A key finding was that women whose partners grew up in mining towns are nearly twice as likely to experience socio-psychological abuse as those whose partners grew up elsewhere. The authors emphasize, however, that the employment of the men in mining should not be considered the only reason for why the female partners experienced abuse.
Carrington et al. (2011) considered the social impacts of mining development on workers and local communities. They cite the finding made by Nancarrow et al. that “Women who have a partner in the mining industry are more likely to experience social psychological abuse” (pp. 342-343), yet fail to note the caveats the original authors place on this conclusion. Drawing on a wide range of research, the authors suggest that the situation of large numbers of young men living in isolated environments with little cultural and social infrastructure increases the likelihood of anti-social and criminal behaviour, including violence, drunkenness, gambling, substance abuse, and domestic violence. The impacts of living in such contexts can also extend back to the family when the male worker returns to their home setting. Significantly, they find that the rate of breaches of domestic violence protection orders was 1.63 times greater in a dominant mining region in Queensland than in the state capital.
Neither of these research articles addresses the specific issue of the extent to which women working on mine sites experience sexual abuse. We were unable to find any research articles which dealt with this particular issue. This suggests that the topic needs greater attention. Future research could include both industry-wide and site-specific interviews with women who work in mining to find out if they have experienced sexual abuse while at work, and to explore the responses they have taken to such abuse. Other questions to consider might include:
– To what extent do men also experience sexual abuse on mine sites?
– How do people who work in mining generally understand “sexual abuse”? What constitutes sexual abuse in this industry, and what behaviors are otherwise generally seen as acceptable?
– Does the culture of masculinity in the mining industry help create certain practices of sexual abuse as “normal”?
– To what extent is or should the mining industry be interested in the domestic sexual abuse that is carried out by its workers at home? Is there any connection between the workplace culture of the mining industry and levels of domestic sexual abuse?
We would be interested to hear from anybody who knows about additional research in this area.
References
Carrington, K., Hogg, R. & McIntosh, A. (2011). “The resource boom’s underbelly” Criminological impacts of mining development”. Australian & New Zealand Journal of Criminology. Vol. 44(3): 335-354.
Nancarrow, H., Lockie, S. & Sharma, S. (2009). “Intimate partner abuse of women in a Central Queensland mining region”. Canberra: Australian Institute of Criminology.
Men’s Experiences of Workplace Bullying
In this blog post we explore the topic of bullying in resource industries. This topic is of interest to us at Factive because it links into our broader work on gender in these industries. It’s also a topic that has received very little attention in the research and in organisational responses to improving workplace culture.
Our thoughts on this topic are inspired by a recent article: O’Donnell, S. & MacIntosh, J. (2015). “Gender and workplace bullying: Men’s experiences of surviving bullying at work”. Qualitative Health Research. O’Donnell and MacIntosh seek to explore the experiences of bullying among men at work. The sample of men included in their study is small; only 20 men in total. It is also very localised in that all the men who were interviewed live in Canada’s Atlantic Provinces. This study nevertheless helps to open up the debate about how men experience bullying in the workplace, and to respond to what the authors identify as a tradition of either exploring bullying only as it impacts on women at work or including the experiences of men as a way of comparing these to the experiences of women.
Their article is not industry specific; the men who participated in the study come from a range of industries. Its findings nevertheless allow us to think about how bullying might be experienced in very specific industries such as mining, oil & gas, and construction. It helps us ask a number of questions that need to be asked to explore how bullying impacts on men in these industries.
– To what extent does bullying take place in these industries?
– How do men in these industries deal with or respond to bullying?
– Are there specific reasons why men are bullied in highly masculinised workplaces, and do these reasons have anything to do with how men are expected to behave as men (or what might also be called “the policing of gender”)?
– What systems are in place for dealing with cases where men are bullied?
– Are these systems different depending on whether the bully is a man, a woman, a colleague, or a superior?
– Are these systems effective?
– What are the impacts of bullying in industries like mining on productivity, employee wellbeing, safety, and leadership?
In starting to think about this topic, we realise there’s a long way to go. Similar to when we first starting thinking about the links between safety and gender in mining, we discover that there are so many unknowns, and so much work to be done to understand this topic fully. The intention of this blog post, therefore, is to open up the conversation about men and bullying in the workplaces of resource companies. We anticipate we will come back to it at a later date.
There’s currently a lot of interest in the impacts of fly-in-fly-out (FIFO) on the personal health and well-being of workers. The FIFO model of employment is often appealing to resource companies. It enables these companies to tap into a much larger skilled labour force than is available in the local area. It can also mean the companies do not have to invest in building the community infrastructure that residential employees and their families often need and desire. In some cases, FIFO is actually the only option available, particularly if the resource operation is on an offshore oil rig or similarly extremely remote.
The current debate is, however, somewhat limiting in that it tends to emphasise how the negative impacts on FIFO workers are the result of their distance from their families. The assumption is made that FIFO workers suffer from mental health issues because they don’t have the support of family members while at work. This assumption is then reaffirmed by employees who see this as an acceptable way of rationalising their position when they are asked to describe how they feel. The “family” is often mythologised as stable and protective, and being away from this space therefore easily becomes a legitimate excuse for explaining why some FIFO employees feel unhappy or under stress. Questions about how the family space truly functions are missing in this debate. Importantly, there is also a lack of attention to how the cultures of the work environments may be causing damage to workers too. It may not simply be that FIFO employees are away from family members who might otherwise be able to provide support, but that the workplace where they are required to live for extended periods of time not only fails to provide that much-needed support, but actively causes discomfort and harm to them.
In male-dominated and highly masculinised contexts, for example, the demand to be appropriately masculine can be intense. It can take up a lot of time and energy on the part of those who are seeking to be seen as masculine enough and those who are intent on policing the masculinity of others around them. The research overwhelmingly shows that highly masculinsed cultures do not welcome or easily accommodate gender diversity. Behaviours and attitudes that are different to the established norms are discouraged and often bullied out of people. This is one of the reasons why many resource companies find it difficult to accommodate women in their workforce, as women are often instantly perceived to be insufficiently masculine and/or some women refuse to adopt what is deemed to be an appropriate masculinity so they can fit in.
An emerging idea in organisations today is the need for employees to learn how to become more “resilient”. Resilience training can focus on providing employees with skills in how to deal with difficult situations in the workplace so that these situations do not cause them stress. This kind of training is seen as a suitable response to help employees cope with stress while at work. There is a danger, however, that resilience training can offer an excuse to ignore the reasons why the difficult situations are there to begin with. Are employees expected to meet impossible demands for work production, for example? Is there a particular manager who is being unprofessional or even cruel with their staff? The demand for employee resilience too easily allows the organisation to avoid having to ask some difficult questions about its workplace culture. It also places the onus of survival on the stressed employee which is akin to saying that people who are intimidated or bullied just need to “toughen up”.
Yet, O’Donnell and MacIntosh identify that bullying at work comes in many different forms. It can be “manipulation, intimidation, humiliation, teasing, belittling, name-calling, criticism, blame, exclusion, isolation, punishment, oppression, withholding of information and resources, undermining work, credibility and reputation, removing work roles and responsibilities, altering work expectations, hampering or denying advancement, dismissal and threats of dismissal, yelling, and physical threats” (p. 3). What is particularly alarming from their study is the finding that the men who sought help from their employer to deal with the bullying all discovered that no support was available. The authors write: “There were no cases where seeking help from these sources [managers, human resource personnel etc.] resulted in workplace organizations taking appropriate steps to resolve the bullying” (p. 4). O’Donnell and MacIntosh further conclude that “speaking up resulted in negative consequences for targets, including having their integrity, reputation, and mental health questioned”. The workplace culture is, therefore, seen to be unwilling or unable to provide support to employees who are bullied. Insufficient work is being done to analyse why the workplace culture provides a space in which bullying occurs to begin with. Instead, individual men are left to deal with their experiences of bullying by themselves, and their responses can be as intense as leaving their job, severe depression, and suicidal thoughts.
One limitation of this study is that it focuses exclusively on the experiences of men who have experienced bullying. To understand why bullying occurs in the workplace, we also need to know how men who bully experience bullying. What motivates men to bully others at work? What do they perceive they gain and what do they actually gain by being a bully? Have they too experienced bullying in the workplace and, if so, how does this affect their attitude towards bullying in so much as they may not even perceive their bullying actions to be “bullying”? Are there specific kinds of people or behaviours they target, and why? A focus on the dominant entity (i.e., the bully) in this relationship of power between the bully and the bullied would bring this kind of research into line with the recent interest in exploring how the construction of dominant identities (e.g., man, white, heterosexual) function to reaffirm subordinate identities (e.g., women, black, homosexual) as “other”.
Given these preliminary ideas and thoughts on bullying in resource industries, the following are some recommendations for what resource companies can do to investigate the impacts of bullying on men in their work spaces:
1. Explore how employees understand bullying. This can be achieved through focus groups, surveys, interviews, and informal discussions in toolbox talks or similar. This provides a baseline for understanding bullying in the local workplace context, and it then becomes possible to compare the workforces understanding of bullying with what the legislation might say about bullying or about how bullying might be understood elsewhere.
2. Carry out a desktop review of relevant organisational policies which address bullying in the workplace, and consider how these can be updated to recognise gender as an important component of bullying. It may be that the organisation has no specific policies on bullying, in which case this might suggest a need to explore why bullying has been hidden or if employees who might normally be responsible for dealing with workplace issues of bullying lack the skills to do so.
3. Analyse the workplace culture to find out what kind of genders are dominant and what kinds of gender are excluded or ridiculed. (Here, the term “gender” must be seen as referring to how we behave as men and women, and not to biological sex.) This will help the organisation to explore experiences of bullying not as examples of bad people picking on victims, but rather as the outcome of a particular workplace culture that preferences specific kinds of people over others.
4. Ensure that senior managers and human resources personnel are adequately trained in how to recognise and respond to bullying, and how the responses might need to differ depending on whether the bully and the bullied are men or women. Safety professionals should also be included in this up-skilling and training, because safety and gender are recognised to be linked, and being bullied can place employees at greater risk of physical harm when at work.
If you have experienced bullying while working in a resource company or if you would like to discuss what your organisation can do to respond to bullying at work, please contact us through our website. If you have some comments or ideas about bullying in male-dominated environments, please write your comment here.
Launch of Hawke-EST
Factive is now a partner in a new extreme situation survival training business.
Myke Hawke and Ruth England, expert survivalists and co-stars of the popular TV series Man Woman Wild, have teamed up with resource industry culture expert and Factive’s Director Dr. Dean Laplonge, to create a new extreme situation survival training service for resource companies and their employees.
Violent attacks against resource extraction operations are unfortunately becoming an all-too familiar news story. Extreme weather events are also on the rise, causing more flooding, landslides, wild fires, and drought. These all constitute heightened threats to the safety of employees working in remote and dangerous locations.
Myke and Ruth will provide bespoke survival training, pre-departure and in-field, to ensure resource company employees can survive in extreme and unpredictable situations. Through the Hawke-EST blog, our team will discuss a range of safety and security issues which impact on the survivability of these employees in the changing global landscape.
Hawke-EST (Extreme Situation Training). Specialist survival training for the resource sector.
Final week to complete the survey…
A new research study on women who work in resource industries and attitudes towards the environment.
See the original blog entry and information HERE.
The survey will close on March 31.
The mis-measuring of workplace diversity in resource industries
A major mining company’s diversity culture has again been the subject of media criticism. Jenna Price, a columnist for The Canberra Times, has attacked BHP Billiton “for showing poor commitment to gender equity in the workplace”. She writes in response to a recent ruling by the Australian Fair Work Commission which denied the claim made by two of the company’s male employees that they were entitled to parental leave. Stephen Smyth, the president of the Queensland branch of the CFMEU, has also stepped into the debate, labeling BHP’s commitment to diversity as “shallow”. What is shallow, however, is the way workplace gender diversity is understood and measured in resource companies.
Central to dominant workplace gender diversity ideology today is that companies should bring more women into their workforces and offer family-friendly workplace policies. A company’s diversity culture is therefore measured by looking at the number of female versus male employees, and by assessing the extent to which employment does not impact negatively on family life. These are surface issues. A shortage of women in a workplace may well be the result of discrimination on the part of employers. Contemporary research into workplace gender diversity however advocates the need to look deeper. It argues that workplace diversity is a more complex issue that needs to be explored at the organizational and structural levels, and not simply in terms of how it impacts specific individuals.
The most up-to-date research in the field of workplace diversity talks about the need to pay attention to “intersectionality”—the idea that when we discuss gender identity we must also consider other identities such as race, age, sexuality, ethnicity, and (dis)ability. This does not mean we also need to count how many black or gay employees are in the workplace to get an effective measurement of diversity. Intersectional diversity demands we think about how employees construct their gender identities at work and through work in multiple, sometimes contradictory, and rarely consistent ways. It promotes the idea that gender is not an isolated part of our identities and behaviors at work, and therefore cannot be considered or responded to in isolation.
Since the late 1980s, it has also been commonplace in the literature on gender in the workplace to talk about “doing gender” at work. This concept seeks to resist the otherwise default position of assuming that gender is something an individual has. It has helped researchers and practitioners think about how genders are constructed in the workplace through hierarchies, the physical space, bodies, interpersonal relationships, working with machinery and technology, job descriptions, management practices, recruitment, performance appraisals, and more. “Doing gender” helps us understand how gender is constructed, challenged, policed, and altered within the organizational space.
Recent research on gender in resource industries specifically has started to explore how gender affects attitudes towards safety and the environment, and how practices of risk-taking or environmental care also help to construct our workplace gender identities. Some researchers have looked at how gender impacts the learning cultures of resource companies. Others study the gender cultures of fly-in-fly-out communities. The gender diversity debate in resource industries is however failing to draw on or engage with this body of research. As the case against BHP Billiton and the responding criticism show, the work that is being done to address gender diversity in these industries is still very much focused on individual people and specific policies. Consideration of how people and policies are constructed and function within an already gendered workplace culture is absent.
There are gendered reasons why this is the case. Resource industries have emerged as dominant industries in contemporary human culture alongside the emergence of a dominant gender order in which masculinity is preferred over femininity. When we begin to think about how resource workplaces are gendered, we inevitably must therefore start to consider the position of masculinity in these workplaces. These industries and their workplaces are, after all, male-dominated. We must also look at what genders are supported by the structures of the organization and which are derided. We have to explore what it means to be a successful man (or woman) in these industries, and consider how specific organizations support normative genders and marginalize others.
My point here is not to support or discredit one particular company over another. Having worked as a consultant on several BHP sites, I would be reluctant to claim that the company’s diversity culture is exceptionally strong. As I recall, BHP’s policy on parental actually allows for either parent, regardless of sex, to receive paid parental leave if they are the primary carer of a newborn child. This policy covers both opposite-sex and same-sex couples, and was extended to include adopted babies. If we were to judge the company’s diversity culture based on this one policy, we might conclude that it is progressive. However, BHP Billiton has not made public the results of any gender audit of its entire organization that it might have conducted. Its leadership has not responded to reports I have written about how its gender culture on specific worksites is putting people at risk. As a consultant there, I witnessed systemic practices of harassment and ridicule of those who were not the norm, and an uneducated dismissal by some senior managers of ideas about gender that did not conform to their own world view.
Its two male employees claimed they were the primary carers of their newborns because the respective mothers had both had caesareans. The company argued successfully that having a caesarean does not automatically mean the mother is incapable of caring for the child. BHP may have been concerned that allowing these two male employees to receive paid parental leave would set a precedent and encourage the partners of other male employees to opt for a caesarean birth knowing this would allow the father of a newborn baby to take paid time off after the birth. Had the two men been granted parental leave, BHP would most likely have been applauded as a company that supports diversity. Regardless of the outcome, this insistence on measuring a company’s diversity culture according to how it impacts on individuals deflects attention away from the work that needs to be done to explore and improve gender diversity in the workplaces of resource companies.
In male-dominated and masculinized industries like mining, the gender diversity work has to look at men, masculine behaviors, masculine practices, and masculine structures. It must explore how genders are produced and practiced within the entire organization, and challenge the assumption that gender belongs to individuals.
National industry discussion on employment in mining
The Mining Industry Human Resources Council (MiHR) has launched its National Industry Discussion to explore experiences of working in mining in Canada.
The goal of this National Discussion is to help Canada’s mining industry offer rewarding career opportunities and positive work environments – and to attract talented workers from all backgrounds.
Complete the survey Here.
You gotta be tough to explore gender in mining
This article was originally published in November 2014 in the Leading Issues Journal by the Australian Centre for Leadership for Women.
You can download the article by clicking on the link at the bottom of the text, or read the full issue of the journal ONLINE.
Debate about gender in mining has been going on for more than two decades. Yet little has changed. The mining industry has utterly failed to investigate its relationship to gender.
In the many repetitive reports that still get issued today to advise mining companies on gender, we read over and over about how women need support to make it in mining. They need mentors, women-only networks, and targeted marketing materials that speak their language. Women continue to be constructed as separate and with distinct needs from men. And it’s only ever women who have gender.
When we promote the idea that women need more help, we maintain the belief they are naturally weak. We also maintain the belief that men are successful because of their natural strength and natural abilities. We fail to investigate what it is about the culture of a workplace or an industry which might make it easier for men than women to make it.
When I present my work about gender in mining at academic conferences, the response is inevitably one of disbelief. How can professionals in mining still believe that dealing with gender is about helping women to make it? How can they still understand “gender” as the biological state of being a man or a woman? Why is the work on gender in mining not engaging with the vast body of knowledge about gender that has been developed over the past four decades in a wide range of disciplines?
It’s partly lack of skills which prevents the mining industry from addressing gender in more complex and effective ways. As I explain in my book, I risk offending people who work as diversity officers or leaders of women networks in mining. But knowledge of gender and education in gender studies is extremely low among this cohort. The mining industry would never dream of seeking to tackle engineering issues without engaging qualified engineers who have been trained in engineering techniques. So why does it believe that gender issues can be addressed by those who have never formally studied gender?
I wrote this book because I believe that instead of focusing on numbers of women, mining companies need to investigate how gender impacts their workplace cultures and their business practices. In the book, I introduce a new understanding of gender for the mining industry; and then provide practical ways of applying this understanding so that leaders and senior professionals in the industry can start to explore the relationship between gender and mining.
Mining and gender have a historical relationship. The mining industry emerged as a distinct industry at around the same time as we started to develop stricter definitions of masculinity and femininity, and stricter separation of the man’s role from the woman’s. The production methods and technologies of the mining industry are already therefore gendered. As others have also explored, people who deliver training to mining industry employees often use masculinity as a way of connecting with the trainees. And senior female professionals in the industry often seek to silence all references to femininity when discussing their own successes.
This preference for the masculine over the feminine doesn’t automatically exclude women from mining. Women can do masculinity. Indeed, many women in the mining industry do masculinity extremely well; and they like the culture of mining as it is. But in the wider culture it is men more so than women who are encouraged to be masculine. And so statistically speaking it is men more so than women who are likely to find the mining industry an appealing place and one in which they can thrive.
The mining industry prefers masculinity which can be easily distinguished from femininity, and one which has no hint of softness. This industry is therefore unable to recognise diversity in ways of working which could be potentially useful and profitable. And it actually encourages risk-taking among its employees who need to display the tough kind of masculinity that the culture of this industry demands.
I have met many men working in mining who talk about the changes they have gone through to fit into the industry. I have talked with many men who weep as they tell me about the devastating impacts the culture of mining has had on their personalities and lives. I recall a few years ago speaking to a father who was concerned about how much his young son had changed since starting work on a mine site. The boy had become more aggressive and rude and defiant. The father’s interpretation of this was that his son was turning “bad”. I suggested to him that “bad” was the wrong word to use to describe what was happening. To the contrary, his son was acting out what on the mine site was considered to be “good” masculinity. In order to fit in, the boy had to do swearing and aggression and defiance.
My book draws on my experiences of having worked as a consultant in resource industries and my formal education in gender studies spanning more than 20 years. But I know it will take a really tough mining company, and some senior managers who are really keen to expand their knowledge of gender, before we will start to see any real changes in the gender culture of the mining industry and greater gender diversity impacting on the entire business of mining.
Why does gender mean no pay?
This opinion piece was first published on 3 February 2014 in the online magazine The Feminist Wire. You can read the original article in full HERE.
This request for expertise on gender to be offered in return for no payment goes to the very heart of the gender problem in resource industries today. It exposes deeply embedded pro-masculine and anti-feminine beliefs, which have guided these industries for centuries. […]
In my reply, in which I declined the invitation, I urged the company to reflect on what the content of their letter reveals about their attitudes toward women. If women and gender are so closely aligned in their minds and practices, then what does it say about how they believe women deserve to be treated when they expect that those who work with gender should not be paid? Did this attitude help to partially explain the gender problem they are facing?
Seeing gender differently
This article was first published in August 2013 in CIM Magazine.
Efforts to improve gender diversity in male-dominated industries like mining and construction are going nowhere. If we compare reports on women in mining today with those released almost twenty years ago, we find the same issues being discussed. We uncover the same problems and we recommend the same solutions. We continue to talk about numbers of women, insisting on the need for changes in recruitment practices, availability of more mentors, and provision of awards for women who have “made it”. The discussion about gender in these industries, and others like them, is always and only about what to do with women. The methodologies used in the research see women as the problem and women as the solution.
You can view the full article by clicking on the link below.