Dan Priems, a Warrant Officer in the Australian Army, reflects on his secondment to Diversity Council Australia.
I began to develop a better understanding of sexism and the part that all men play in it. I began to consider what the likely response of a man would be if a sexist comment was made about his sister/partner/daughter/mother. I then thought what the response would be if the same comment was made to a stranger passing by. I concluded that in many cases, men would react very differently.
Read Dan’s full blog entry HERE.
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.
This article was written by Anika Reynolds. It appeared in The Mining Chronicle.
A new workplace program designed to improve employee safety communications has been launched with the premise that empowering workers and customising safety solutions will deliver better results for companies. MySafe, by cultural research consultancy Factive, is a comprehensive communications program which examines safety communications across a company, rather than on a particular or individual aspect of safety.
To view the full article, click the link below.
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?
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.
This article was first published on 7 June 2013 in Mining Weekly, and was written by Esmarie Swanepoel.
“The way I look at gender is not about bodies, but about what it means to be a certain sex. Gender is the practice of performing that sex – the cultural expectations of a man or a woman,” Laplonge said.
You can download the full article by clicking on the link below.
Simply advertising to women won’t help mining companies achieve gender diversity.
This article was published on 8 May 2013 in CIM Reporter.
More than 100 participants engaged in this year’s thought-provoking Women in Mining forum. Discussions touched on female employment gaps in mining, specifically in non-traditional and senior management roles, along with company strategies for encouraging and increasing diversity and a philosophical and sociological dissection of gender.
You can view the full article HERE. You can also download the article by clicking on the link below.
The Getting Home Safely report was written in response to an inquiry into the safety practices of the construction industry in the Australian Capital Territory (ACT). This inquiry was requested due to the high level of injuries in the construction industry in the ACT and in response to three fatalities that had occurred in this industry in the year prior.
This document offers our response to the Getting Home Safely report.
It is our recommendation that the report should urgently be complemented by an addendum report which explores the relationship between gender and the organisation of the construction industry in the ACT; and that this addendum report provide clear guidance to the industry on why it needs to investigate this relationship and how construction companies can go about it.
To request a copy of Factive’s response to the report, please contact us via our website.
This article was written by Kathryn Edwards, Editor of the Australasian Mine Safety Journal. Publication date is unknown.
You can read this commentary piece by clicking on the link below.
This podcast was recorded on 2 December 2012 by Jacqueline Bran for Mining IQ.
In this recent interview Mining IQ spoke with Dean Laplonge, Director of Factive about diversity in the mining industry. The goal of this podcast was to address and to investigate cultural and social issues that affect businesses in the mining industry. In this interview Dean addresses gender behaviours, stereotypes and preconceptions surrounding ‘gender’ in the mining industry. Together we question the role of ‘women in the mining industry’ and what that really means.
You can listen to the full podcast HERE. If this link is no longer working, contact us through Factive’s website to request a copy of the audio file.