The Frontier, Entrepreneurialism, and Engineers: Women Coping with a Web of Masculinities in an Organizational Culture

This article summarizes the results of an empirical study into the gendered culture of the oil industry as experienced by professional women who work in it. Goals of the project included adding to the knowledge base on gendered organizational culture and to the feminist project of making women's experience visible. The oil industry is particularly important, both materially and symbolically, for women since it is globally powerful, is dominated by engineers, and locally, is reputed to be progressive in human resources policies and practices. Yet, it has a poor record of retaining women at management levels. Adopting an interpretive, feminist cultural analysis, the claim is made that the most durable barriers to women are largely embedded in the gendered culture of this industry. The gendering of the oil industry takes place through five dominant themes, or processes: the myth of the frontier, and the cowboy hero, create a belief in a particular approach to work that is deeply embedded in the industry's cultural assumptions; this belief system is expressed as entrepreneurialism, which, when combined with an engineering culture reinforces the division of work by gender; daily interactions characterized by informalism and paternalism exclude women from networks of power; and women's adaptation strategies reinforce the masculine value system resulting in short term, individual success, and long term failure for gender change.