‘I Definitely Don’t Want to Work with Seven People Who Are the Same as Me’: Gender and Senior Managers in Swedish Industrial Mining

This article focuses on gendered organizational structures in the Swedish mining industry, drawing on empirical material from interviews with 16 senior managers. Understanding these managers as occupying a position of “firstness” in an industry recognized for its economic and geopolitical value for Sweden, the article analyzes managers’ accounts of gender, exploring how they describe and make sense of gender (in)equality and gendered practices in organizational settings. The article contributes empirically to previous research on how gender inequality in mining is framed as a question of numerical imbalance and organizational performance, and theoretically by demonstrating how gendered power relations are reproduced through discursive distancing. In managers’ narratives, awareness of gender does not necessarily translate into a constructive critique of, or challenges to, gendered organizational structures and male dominance. Instead, awareness of gender as “an issue” may function as a discursive resource through which men distance themselves from problematic masculinities while leaving the underlying structures intact.