A similar version of this article was published on 10 September 2014 in the online magazine Archer. That version can be accessed HERE.
There has been no discussion on LGBTQI people working in industries such as mining, construction, or oil and gas. Even consultants like me who have been interested in exploring gender issues in male-dominated industries have remained silent on this issue. Should this change?
Given what we know about the impacts of societal norms on LGBTQI people in general, we can be fairly confident that some LGBTQI people who work in heavy industries will have experienced workplace bullying. Some will be feeling guilty because they are not speaking out whenever they hear a colleague make a homophobic comment. Others will be struggling to act out in ways which do not match their preferred gender. We could argue that we must help these people deal with the mental health issues they must be experiencing. We could insist they need support to help them remain resilient at work.
When I first started investigating the role of gender in resource industries, I pointed out that a consulting company could make a fortune by offering a workshop on gender for leaders in these industries. In an article on “Doing safer masculinities” published in m/c Journal in 2013, I further argued that gender training in these industries is driven more by “commercial imperative” than by proven methodologies of learning in this field.
As we break the silence on LGBTQI people working in these industries, we will no doubt find that consulting companies will also start to offer workshops that seek to raise awareness of LGBTQI issues. This training will be promoted as improving the “people skills” of senior leadership; or it will be targeted at human resources personnel who are encouraged to expand their knowledge in “diversity”. The LGBTQI-in-resources market carries one massive pink dollar sign.
There’s no denying that personnel who work in heavy industries are extremely ill-equipped to deal with issues that might affect their LGBTQI colleagues. Discussions about sexuality or sexual identity are non-existent here. The links between safety and sexual identity, or between gender preferences and gender practices, are only now starting to be explored in academic research, but this work is barely trickling down into the workplaces. Instead, we continue to see industry resistance even to expanding the debate about gender beyond the subject of women.
But quick workshop training is not the solution. This will not make the workplaces of heavy industries any safer or better for LGBTQI people. And it will not help to create queer-friendly companies.
Firstly, it is wrong to suggest that all LGBTQI people working in heavy industries need help. For some the silence that exists is welcome. They are able to “pass” unnoticed. They can go about their work without their sex, gender identity, or sexuality identity having anything to do with their career. They can enjoy the financial and professional rewards that are often more readily available to straight men.
We also need to be careful about forcing open the closet doors in a way that could put individuals at risk. There are different reasons for why somebody would choose not to announce their sexual or gender identity; and not all of these reasons indicate that the person is repressed or oppressed or even unhappy. Any forced opening of the closet can lead to violence, self-harm, despair and depression, ridicule, and abuse.
The idea that LGBTQI people need help also reinforces the belief they are weaker than other people. It’s an attitude which mimics that often taken towards women. The women-in-mining debate, for example, is not a sexist concern; it aims to provide opportunities for women to find fulfilling careers in the mining industry. But it is a sexist approach which sees women as lacking and in need of assistance, while at the same time we ignore the histories and structures of the mining industry which continue to make this industry more suitable for men.
More damage than good will be done by offering an off-the-shelf workshop to discuss what it means to be gay or anything similar. This approach may well meet the desires of management to show they are doing something “good”. But we will end up with people who are working in very small communities suddenly thinking about who among them might be gay, transgender, or queer. And while leaders and personnel in human resources might have a better awareness of what these terms mean because they have been “trained”, the rest of the workforce and community will not. Everybody else will have to rely on gossip, assumptions, innuendo, and ignorance to help them respond.
If we are going to explore what it means to be a LGBTQI person in heavy industries, we need to focus on long-term education. We need to think about how the structures and culture of a workplace function to create the “normal” person, and what this means for LGBTQI people in that workplace. We need to consider how it is that organisations and workplaces create LGBTQI people as “different” to begin with. If we don’t, we will always see LGBTQI people as the problem.
Author: Dean Laplonge, PhD.