What’s the situation for gay men and lesbians who work in resource industries? How does the workplace culture affect non-heterosexuals? Will they benefit from better policies? We have posted on this topic before. An article on this topic was also recently published in Corporate Knights. Here we provide some further ideas about this issue and propose some effective responses.
The issue is certainly more complex than simply telling people to “come out”. Here are some points that are often missing in the debate and which need to be considered when looking at how to address the broader issue of sexuality in the workplace:
• We can’t assume that every gay person dislikes the existing culture of resource industries. It is possible to be gay and to enjoy a hyper-masculine environment.
• The identities of people who experience same-sex attraction are complex. Not everybody who is in a same-sex relationship or who engages in sex with people of the same sex identifies as “gay”. And their reasons for rejecting the gay label are not always because they are “closeted”.
• If we encourage gay and lesbians to come out at work, can we be sure we have the skills and knowledge to respond adequately and appropriately? If the workplace doesn’t have the right support systems in place, or if human resource personnel haven’t studied the relationship between sexual identity and work, we may be placing people at risk of being bullied and further ostracized.
• Understandings of gender affect how gays and lesbians are treated in the workplace. The issues of gender and sexuality can’t be separated. A dislike or rejection of femininity is something that has been explored in the research on gender in male-dominated industries like mining. Gay men might have a hard time in these industries because it’s often assumed they are feminine. This assumption needs to be challenged, as does a dislike of femininity.
• It’s easy to introduce a policy to ensure discrimination doesn’t happen in the workplace. It’s also easy to run a training program to teach employees about discrimination based on sexual orientation. It’s not so easy for an organization to research how its workplace culture is already sexualized in such a way that might make it difficult for gays and lesbians to work comfortably.
• It’s not just gays and lesbians who are affected by cultural ideas about gender and sexuality that circulate in the workplace. We also need to consider the situation for transgender people, bisexuals, intersex people, and other “queer”-identifying people.
Here are some alternative approaches to this issue. From our experience, these have more of a long-term impact, and they help address the issue at the source:
• Focus groups with employees to explore how they understand sexuality and sexual identity.
• Workplace behavior observations to identify how workers construct their sexual identities in the everyday.
• Education for key personnel (managers, human resources personnel, safety professionals etc.) on what “sexual identity” is, how it impacts our lives, and what role it might play in the workplace. Get them reading and discussing. Get them really thinking about how this particular issues impacts their business and workplace culture.
• Research and discussions about how a workplace already preferences heterosexuality. Why do heterosexual men and women feel more comfortable than people who have a different sexual identity? How do assumptions about sexuality affect the business’ communications, policies, and operations? The focus now is on how the workplace defines what is “normal”, rather than always on those who are marginalized.
• Where we also need more high-level research into this topic is in exploring the links between specific male-dominated industries and human concepts of sexuality. For example, we need to think about how mining has developed as a particularly masculine industry within a wider human culture that has also created categories of sexuality and assumptions about what is “good” masculinity.
Dr. Dean Laplonge, Director, Factive:
“It’s not right that people have to be subjected to discrimination at work because of their sexuality. In adult workspaces, too often we see people acting out as if they were still in the school play area. It’s really disheartening and sometimes it can have devastating impacts on people’s lives. I have heard so many stories from gay, lesbian, and transgender people who work in the resources sector over the years. But let me tell a bit of my own. I can think of two specific examples when homophobia has impacted me directly in the workplace.
I was once heading up some leadership training for a group of senior managers who worked on site for a large, global mining company with operations in Western Australia. For whatever reason, they became obsessed with asking me questions about my sexuality. It took me a long time and a lot of patience to get them to refocus on what we were there to study. These were grown men, senior professionals working for a company that had clear policies about anti-discrimination and even some policies that actively supported gay employees. It was quite shocking.
The second time was when I was doing some consulting work for a Japanese oil and gas company which had recently started a new operation in Australia’s Northern Territory. There was one senior manager who couldn’t stand being around me. He went out of his way to undermine me and I received numerous reports back from others in the office about what he was saying about me and particularly his homophobic comments. I reported him to Human Resources and was told there was nothing that could be done. I reported him to his manager, and was told “he’s really a good guy who cares about safety”. I decided to quit what was a highly toxic and unpleasant culture. This same company has recently started to put its name to a range of very public diversity initiatives, even though (based on what I continue to hear from friends who work there) this particular manager and the workplace culture haven’t changed at all.
There’s a big difference between being a company that says it respects diversity and being a company that does diversity every day in the workplace. This is why I am more interested in looking at how diversity runs through a workplace’s entire culture rather than responding to the issue with a diversity policy or equal opportunities training.”
Later this year, Factive will be launching two new research projects to explore different aspects of what it means to be “queer” in the resources sector. Dr. Laplonge is also working on a new book which includes a number of chapters that discuss sexuality and mining using different approaches. If you have any questions about this issue, you can post a comment here or contact us through our website.
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 absence of masculinity in gender training for United Nations’ peacekeeping personnel.
This paper considers the extent to which gender training for United Nations peacekeepers encourages reflection on how understandings of gender affect behaviors. Through an analysis of the content of three training packages, we find that the UN appears to show a fear of tackling the subject of masculinity, even as practices of masculinity may be driving gender-based violence in peacekeeping operations.
The Absence of Masculinity in Gender Training for UN Peacekeepers, Peace Review: A Journal of Social Justice, 27:1, 91-99,
DOI: 10.1080/10402659.2015.1000198
To request a copy, please contact us through our website.
Dana Britton sums up Factive’s approach to exploring gender in the workplace extremely well.
“Describing an occupation as feminized or masculinized, or, more generically, as gendered, is not at all the same thing as noting that it is male or female dominated, and conflating the two may keep us from seeing contexts in which male-dominated work, for example, is more or less masculinized or may obscure the historical process through which definitions of gender appropriate work are shaped. […]. Applying the concept of gendering in a strictly nominal fashion not only obscures issues of historical and social context but also, again, limits the potential of the gendered-organization’s approach to produce meaningful social and organizational change.”
(“The epistemology of the gendered organization”, 2000, published in Gender & Society, Vol. 14, No. 3, pp. 418-434).
When we say that an organization is gendered because it has more men than women, the obvious solution is to try to bring more women into the workforce. This approach confuses sex with gender. More women in the workforce does not un-gender or de-gender a workplace. It also does not naturally produce changes in the gender culture of the workplace. Women can and do work in male-dominated workplaces by adopting the practices of the masculine culture. Britton shows this in her example of female prison officers. Factive has also seen this among women working in mining and oil & gas.
Importantly, when we focus on numbers of women versus men as evidence of a gendered organization, this tends to consume our attention; and so we fail to investigate how the organization (re)produces genders, and how these productions of gender further create inequities, relationships of power, and hierarchies. We too readily hear today about male champions who are supporting the employment of more women in their organizations. But what are these “champions” doing to explore the gendering of their organization instead of simply trying to change the sex dynamics of the workforce?
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.
Factive is seeking women who are currently working in resource industries to participate in a research project which aims to explore their attitudes towards the environment.
Background
Women are often stereotypically assumed to have a natural connection to the environment (“mother earth”). This is linked to cultural beliefs about women as nurturers and carers, and the corresponding practices of women in male-dominated societies. But what do women who work in resource industries really think about the environment? Given the kind of work they do, do these women have attitudes towards the environment that are different to what we expect of women? Have they been influenced by ideas about the environment that have been introduced in feminist, ecofeminist, and environmental research? Are they more or less “green” than men?
Participation
Participants must identify as female and must currently be working in a resource industry.
All correspondence between Factive and the participants will be strictly confidential and anonymous.
Participants must commit to completing an initial online survey (approximately 10 minutes). Some participants may be asked to participate in an additional private 1-on-1 interview.
You can access the survey HERE.
Our updated website offers information on our services, workplace programs, and research. View the new website HERE.
We also have a new blog where we will be posting articles and stories relevant to our work in the areas of gender, safety, and communications in the workplace. You are reading our blog now!
If you have relevant news items, links to articles, or discussion points relating to our areas of work and research, please contact us through our website to discuss cross-posting.
You can also look through the archives of our blog to find articles that were published before 2015. Some of these have been pulled from our previous website. You can access peer-reviewed publications and more in-depth articles on the new Factive website.
(Apologies to our Twitter followers and Facebook friends while we have been sorting out all the links and settings!)
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.
A full, updated version of this article appeared in Diversity Matters, an online magazine published by Diversity Council Australia. You can download the published version by clicking on the link at the bottom of the text.
“Gender” equals “women”?
When we think about “gender”, we usually think about women. Today’s gender problems in the workplace tend to highlight the low number of women in senior positions, how women often get paid less for doing the same work as men, the difficulties women face trying to juggle their careers and family responsibilities, and how many professions continue to marginalise women. When we see another gender problem in the workplace such as harassment, we quickly jump to the conclusion that we need to make the workplace safer and better for women.
We are utterly wrong to think that women and gender are the same. We are equally utterly wrong to think that the solution to gender problems at work is more support for women.
Year after year we see the publication of yet more reports on women in the workplace. For decades, these reports have been telling us the same things. Women do not have equal access to employment opportunities. Women find it more difficult to get to the top in an organisation. Women are more likely to face discrimination at work. And the response continues to be that women need more of our help. The methodologies used in the research see women as the problem and then women as the solution. Governments and companies are encouraged to do more to help women succeed.
The result is that we allow the men and the masculine structures of our workplaces and industries to go about their business as if gender has nothing to do with them.
No doubt the intent is noble—we want to see more women enjoying a successful career without harassment. But the way we go about it is extremely paternalistic. Women are perfectly capable of working in any industry and doing any job. They can also do so free of harassment. It’s just that the gendered structures of our workplaces often make it impossible for many of them to do so. When we focus on women as the problem and the solution, we fail to consider what allows men to succeed in the workplace. For instance, why do men more so than women manage to go through their work life without experiencing sexism, bullying, and aggression?
Gendered workplace structures
A few years back I was involved in the development of some workplace culture programs for a new oil and gas venture in Australia. The company was at the very beginning of planning out its operations, so everybody’s work was focused on building systems and planning. Immediately I could see how the aggressive, bullying tactics of a few senior men were driving the development of the workplace culture. I saw women in tears. I counselled men who were experiencing what it felt like to be the victim of bullying for the first time in their lives. Senior management and the human resources personnel did nothing in response to numerous complaints. The result is that this company as it moves into an operational stage has been built on a foundation of aggressive and harassing masculinity.
Men regularly rely on the masculine structures of their organisations to provide them with a workplace in which they can thrive. Men are no more naturally competent or successful than women, but men are more easily allowed to become so when an organisation supports masculinity. Men (and women) are encouraged to be bullies and to harass others when the culture of the workplace preferences this way of doing gender.
In highly masculinised industries men can be the recipients of sexist comments and behaviours too. This is because “normal” masculinity in these workplaces is often dependent on a rejection of anything feminine and ridicule of anything that appears even slightly “gay”. Language is regularly used to bring into line those men who don’t appear to be acting masculine enough. These “failing” men are told to “stop acting like such a girl”. Banter and practical jokes are also often used among men to police masculinity.
A typical response I get from managers in resource companies is that their overly masculine workplace culture will naturally change when they introduce more women. Here the assumption is that women are soft and caring, and that they will remain so even when they are placed in otherwise aggressive situations. A manager of a resource operation in Western Australia once placed a young female apprentice in a team of guys who were regularly arguing and fighting. He came to me later to express his surprise that she had not “done her job” of calming these men down. Instead, she too had started acting aggressively. His problem—and the problem of so many professionals who work with gender—is that he misunderstood what gender is and how it works. He took some stereotypical ideas about men and women, and used these to run his dangerous and extremely unethical experiment.
Does “saving” women really work?
In response to levels of harassment in heavy industries, we have seen the introduction of equal opportunities training which hopes to teach men to be less sexist. I have sat in on a number of these. While it is certainly important to educate workplaces about legal compliance, the effectiveness of the approach commonly taken is questionable.
The training sessions tend to last for about two hours. They introduce men to the laws governing sexual harassment in the workplace. The men are encouraged to be scared because, as the presenter always emphasises, it’s often not simply a matter of whether what they were doing was intended to be sexist or not. If the “victim” interprets it as sexist, then it is.
I see no evidence of workplace culture change as a result of this kind of training. In fact, the male participants often come away joking about how they now have to act like “the wife” is around them when at work. Workplace sexism is not the result of psychological dysfunction on the part of individuals who can be changed. It is deeply cultural. It is innate to the organisation and the way it has been structured. Men (and women) do not act out in sexist ways because they want to be bad. To the contrary, sexist attitudes and behaviours are regularly ways of representing oneself as the “good employee” in workplaces where denigration of the feminine is indicative of appropriate and approved masculinity.
In highly masculinised workplaces, we need to stop arguing that women need more help to work free of harassment. To do so continues to place them in a subordinate position to men, as it sees women still as the weaker sex. It assumes that harassment is a natural part of what men do and that it’s only women who suffer.
Rethinking gender at work
Instead, we must start exploring how heavy industries and individual companies use gender to benefit men—and often only certain kinds of men. We need to think about how the organisation of a mine site or a construction site works to ensure we ignore or encourage masculine behaviours which are otherwise insulting or damaging towards others.
Unfortunately, managers who work in heavy industries are often reluctant to respond. They simply do not have the skills in dealing with gender as a cultural issue. They rely on advice about gender which focuses their attention on the paternalistic protection of women. They also often excuse harassing behaviour as nothing more than men being men. They too can engage in the same kind of behaviour as a way of managing their people. And those who feel they are being bullied are simply advised to be more resilient—to “toughen up princess”.
This is an extremely serious issue and one which deserves much better attention than it is being given today. The safety implications of harassment have been clearly identified. Research has shown a link between practices of normative masculinity and safety at work. Trying to fit in with the existing masculine workplace can and does cost lives.
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.