The Real Reason Why I (a Woman) Quit the Mining Industry

Diversity is a hot topic these days in the mineral exploration and mining industry. It seems that no matter what conference you attend, someone will comment on the number of older Caucasian men that are in the room vs. people that are younger, female, indigenous or ethnically diverse. The discussion always leads to a consensus that the industry needs more diversity. While this true, I often find that the discussion fails to address the factors that may be inhibiting these groups from entering, and/or staying, in the industry. I am a Caucasian female, so I can only speak to my experiences as a white, Anglophone, female exploration geologist. This article is a reflection of my experiences in mineral exploration field work.

For two or three years now, I have wanted someone in the industry to talk publicly about the experiences I will outline below, but I have yet to come across any substantial discussion on these topics. After hearing (privately) similar stories from other female peers in the industry, I gained some confidence to share these experiences. I have had younger female students and new graduates ask me what it's really like to be a female in the mineral exploration and mining industry. A part of me wants to lie and say it wasn't so bad, but I know that wouldn’t help these students, nor would it prepare them for the situations they may encounter. The truth is, I found my experiences too difficult to tolerate – so I left.

I graduated with a BSc in earth sciences from Dalhousie University in 2011, and worked many contract field and office jobs from 2011-2014. During university I worked two summer jobs with the Geological Survey of Canada and after graduation I flew immediately to Australia to work as an exploration geologist for about a year. Once I returned to Canada, I worked two summers as a field exploration geologist in Nunavut. I spent my winters working in offices in Toronto for mineral exploration/consulting companies and my last field job was in Northwest Territories in 2014. I maintained employment throughout the downturn but it wasn't without my fair share of the necessary job hop. As a result, I have been exposed to a lot of different work situations.

I want to clarify that I never felt discriminated against by my bosses or upper management. When I began my different jobs, most of my on-site bosses were female. I was treated with respect from management and gender was never a topic of discussion. When I was given additional responsibilities it felt empowering and reassuring, knowing that I must be doing a good job rather than being promoted because I was female. The gender discussion normally focuses on upper management’s responsibilities for keeping females in the workforce, but I left the industry due to the interactions I had with people whom had no power over my work or position in a company.

I also rarely felt uncomfortable as a result of the behaviour of my fellow geologists on any of these jobs. Over 4-5 years of field work, what really wore me down was the behaviour of drillers, drill helpers and tradespeople working in the industry, When I entered the industry in 2011 as a bright-eyed new graduate, my tolerance for sexist comments or actions was pretty high. If someone made a comment or acted out of turn, I'd generally laugh it off or turn a blind eye, thinking I needed to play it cool so my drill team would like me. In 2012 and 2013, the behaviour of others made me more acutely aware of my ‘femaleness’ (being singled out as different), and also the entrenched sexism in the work-force that posed risks of insubordination and aggression.

Being ‘different’

During the 2012 and 2013 summer field seasons, I was in an isolated camp with lots of mine site construction occurring, so in addition to our 30-person geological team there were about 70 other workers on site. The geology team was essentially half male and half female, but as a whole the site was probably 80% males and 20% females.

It was during the summer of 2013 that I started to notice small differences in how I was being treated by the men around the site. Our geology team spent most of this summer at an isolated camp about one-hour away from the main site, however a few times a month some of us would spend a few nights back at our main camp. After returning from days out geological mapping, there was a 70m walk from the building entrance to the cafeteria where we had dinner. By the time I had walked down the hallway and started getting my food, I would have been asked two or three times how my day was - by men to whom I had never talked to before and who were all between the ages of 35-55, while I was 24 years old. By contrast, my male geology colleagues wouldn't so much have been asked once by anyone how their day was going. Over time, this became very uncomfortable. You may be thinking that it's nice to be asked how your day is going, and that the men meant no harm at all by asking me how my day was. This may or may not be true. Even assuming that each of these interactions was innocent, the end result of it was that it made me feel like a target. I was being singled out and noticed by men whom I'd never actually met, which is uncomfortable when you're sleeping and living in very close confines.

This feeling of ‘difference’ was compounded by my feelings of vulnerability while walking to the shower with a towel in my hands. I made a point of avoiding eye contact with men while walking to the shower because it made feel uncomfortable that they were seeing me in this seemingly vulnerable state. I already felt I was being objectified while walking down the hallways; this situation added more sensitivity to the situation.

I knew I was one of the few women on site, but the combination of all of these remarks, and looks, left me feeling targeted. I just wanted to not be stared at as I passed men in the hallways every single day. When you're on a work site with probably 80% men, it seems like being noticed would be bound to happen and would be mostly innocent, but it was also inevitable that I would notice it happening all of the time.

These circumstances invoked uncomfortable feelings, but none of the actions were discriminatory, violent or abusive. They made me feel very uncomfortable and yet I couldn’t complain to my boss to “do something” about them. No one was doing anything wrong. I'm not mad that I couldn't change anything about it, or that I couldn't complain to anyone, or that my boss was unable to punish someone for how they made me feel. It’s not like any of those men were doing anything wrong, nor would they have thought they were making me uncomfortable by asking me how my day was going. Nonetheless, the cumulative effect of those individual actions was to leave me feeling isolated and targeted, particularly as I was already uncomfortably outnumbered.

Some female colleagues on site didn't seem to notice or were not as affected by it as I was. Nonetheless, I've since talked to a fair number of people now and I have realized that I am not the only female who experienced situations like these and felt uncomfortable.

Managing men

I started one of my mineral exploration jobs as a logging geologist. I was working with my geology friends in the core shack and liaising with the drillers once or twice a day to discuss the core hand off and to see how drilling was going. At the time, the on-site project manager was female. She was a great boss, and certainly knew how to keep the drillers in line, but they didn't like that, or her, very much. While at the drill rigs, I would hear many sexist remarks and jokes about her. This made me uncomfortable but I did not know what to do or say, so I would either ignore their comments or just try to get away.

A few weeks later, I was the on-site project manager and I had to be the one who kept the drillers in line. There were times when the drill teams were trying to push the envelope, and I had to tell them what to do, or what not to do, and they weren't happy about that either. I knew what they might be saying behind my back. I had heard what they said about my boss, so I was pretty sure they were saying similar things about me. My suspicions were confirmed when I heard a drill foreman whisper something under his breath about me after I had to tell him to change something. I don’t know how the drilling team would have acted if the on-site manager was male, because on this site they had always been females.

Sexualized conversations in the work-place

One summer, I was working in a camp of 20 people total, and the gender balance was evenly split among the team. I was washing dishes with a male co-worker on the third day of camp, so I had only met this man 3 days prior. Within 10 minutes of talking, he told me that he would probably cheat on his girlfriend this summer while in the field, and hook up with someone (no one in particular) while at camp. This mostly confused me; aside from the adult workers, there were 10 geologists total and 5 were female, and I think I was the only single female at the time. Did he automatically assume that the females in camp would want to sleep with him and he had his picking of us in the camp? Was he planning on making this happen at any cost even if we weren't interested? Was he telling me he wanted to sleep with me? Mostly shocked, and confused, I never said anything about this to my superiors and just warned my female geology colleagues about his comments. I decided to keep my distance from him, the best that I could with only 20 people in camp, for the remainder of the summer. I was new to the industry and had a thick skin, so I found this situation more confusing and distasteful than angering.

At another project site, a sexualized comment was made, about women, to my male colleague geologist by one of the driller helpers. I wasn't around for this, but the male geologist told the whole team later what had happened. As my male geologist friend was approaching a drill to check in with their team, the drill helper opened up the conversation by saying something along the lines of "Man, how great is it to [perform oral sex on a woman]". My male geologist colleague also expressed feeling uncomfortable with this comment.

I'm not sure why the geologist decided to tell us what the helper said, but he did. At the time, I recall wondering how I was supposed to conduct myself around this helper now. What was I supposed to think about someone who opens up a conversation with a comment like that? How was I supposed to feel comfortable around him in a work place?

Some may minimize the impacts of this by calling it ‘locker room’ talk between men. I disagree. It stereotypes men, first of all, by assuming they all enjoy objectifying women and discussing their sexual experiences with each other. Second, it is not appropriate conversation at a work-place. Perhaps one of the challenges is that some parts of the industry don’t view exploration sites as work-places, and as a result don’t come to work with the appropriate mind-set and filters. These sorts of conversations need to be part of the recruitment process in all parts of the industry, whether you’re joining a law firm involved with mineral financing or a drilling company.

Sexual harassment

At one of my mineral exploration jobs, there were 4 showers at site, all in the same plywood type building. One shower was kept separate to serve as the female’s bathroom. At the time that I needed to shower, this shower was in use, so I had to use one of the showers in the driller's dry, just around the corner. This dry in particular was very open and was visible from the kitchen and proximal to the first door that anyone would use to enter the kitchen. I wasn't worried about safety. This camp was a 30-40 person camp, and we all worked together, so I knew everyone on site, unlike the job in Nunavut.

I was showering mid-day while acting as on-site manager, so for the most part the camp was empty aside from the cook. The day shift drillers were all at the drills, and the geologists were at the core shack a helicopter flight away. The drillers on night shift would sometimes have trouble sleeping during the day and this happened to be one of those days. When I walked in to go take a shower, I noticed that one driller was awake and sitting in the kitchen. No one else was around except for him. My first thought was, "oh no, why did he have to see me heading to the shower", once again trying to avoid the watchful eyes in camp. As I was drying up, I heard rustling sounds outside the shower door. I figured it was nothing, or that maybe the driller was trying to find something.

As I exited the shower, I found that the driller had pulled up a seat two feet away from my shower door. This would have been a normal place for a driller to sit, as the chairs were there for them, but not at this particular moment in time! The dry was not filled with people and there was no one else around. He had been sitting in the kitchen before, but for some reason (during my shower) he had relocated to a spot in close proximity to my shower stall.

I exited the shower feeling horror and embarrassment, as I felt he had invaded my space. Why had he changed where he was sitting? The kitchen was close, but it was technically in a different area of the building. He would have had to walk down a short hallway to get to where he had been sitting during my shower, all the while knowing that I was in there. Why had he changed locations? Why had he chosen to sit outside my shower?

I was humiliated and even went so far as to question why I decided to still shower after noticing the driller in the kitchen, as if this was my fault. I told my on-site boss about this, and that it made me feel uncomfortable. What bothered me most about this situation was that even if he had been confronted, he could have simply denied it, and said that I was lying, or crazy, or paranoid.

Another day, in that same camp, I woke up one morning at 5:30am as I usually did as on-site project manager. The first thing that I saw when I opened the door to the kitchen was a magnet with a woman in a bikini on it. This is not something I was prepared to see at 5:30am and certainly not something that was appropriate for the work place. I blew it off and went to walk down the hallway to the kitchen, but spotted more magnets around with similar images. I took them and threw them out, and then moved to the geology tent where there were one or two more around as well. What better way to feel outnumbered, isolated and objectified on a daily basis than waking up and instantly seeing women being objectified? My tolerance for these antics was gone by this point. During this summer I started speaking up about my frustrations and aired this grievance during our weekly camp wide meeting. Some of the drill team came up to me afterwards saying how disgusted they were that someone did that. The images made me feel uncomfortable as a woman at the small exploration site, and they were not appropriate for a work place in general.

Where do we go from here?

Over time, it wasn't any one of these events that caused me to want to quit the industry. It was the build up and piling up of each event, along with others, that eventually just made me overflow with uncomfortable feelings and disgust for the industry. I accepted the fact that at least in the near future, females will always be outnumbered and I was wholeheartedly mentally exhausted with dealing with these small, yet uncomfortable, situations. Although I decided to quit field work, I still hold a job related to the industry which means I can live in a large city and feel less outnumbered. Even to this day however, I get these feelings at conferences or events for the mineral exploration and mining industry. I'm growing tired of the constant comments and jokes such as "look around the room, we need more young people, we need more females; there are only 10 females here out of 70 people." Immediately, I feel like a token female in the room there to just help the industry reach its quota. I just roll my eyes now, once again feeling singled out and isolated for just being in the room, and being female.

Diversity is an important topic to discuss however, but we need to talk more about the day to day issues females really face in the industry. I have a back bone and I have thick skin, but over 4 years of constant negative interactions, that skin broke and I needed to get out immediately. The females that stick around must have more thick skin than I do, or maybe they haven't experienced as many issues but I think this is an important topic of discussion for increasing the gender balance of the industry. How do we stop this behavior? One way is by having more females in the industry and in the field. How do we make that happen? It's the question everyone is asking, and it is not one I am able to answer but I am willing to be involved in the discussion and take whatever actions I can. Are you?

Disclaimer

I do not want to generalize and say that all trades people and drillers contribute are sexist or inconsiderate, but through my personal experiences so far, they have been the ones I have experienced the most conflict with.

Generously edited by N. Kara.