WOW Bites: Survival Guide for Chicks on Rigs.

Earlier this month I had the honour of presenting at the World of Women (WOW) part of the Sydney Writers Festival. It was quite an inspiring session, with speakers who included the likes of novelist Melissa Luckashenko to a young Iraqi lady who had traveled to Australia seeking asylum.

Find out more about WOW at Sydney here.

The majority of the 'Bites' - strictly ten minutes bites of inspiration and the like - were quite deep and moving. Lucashenko's and Kristi Mansfield's were both quite brutal to be honest, forcing the audience to confront issues of rape and violence occuring on a daily basis to young women in our own cities.

I took a different tack and went for a slightly more light hearted and humourous angle. My piece was a 'Survival Guide for Chicks on Rigs...' (because you know, there are just so many of us!). I started off with a bit of a poem...and I would like to share a little bit of the presentation with you!

Aren't you frightened, they will ask,

Of the men, the remoteness, the difficulty of the task?

Why on earth do you want to do that, they will question

Where as if you were a guy, that wouldn't rate a mention.

The fact of the day is, ladies and gentlemen,

That this guide is not about survival.

We will survive - Gloria Gaynor said so.

It is about thriving and owning our power from the get go.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome.

Working on the oil and gas rigs, particularly as a woman, is an adventure and a half indeed.

As I am an engineer and love lists and numbers, I've put together a numbered list of suggestions, and I hope you enjoy!

Number 1.

Determine where YOUR line is, how thick YOUR skin is, how much you are willing to let slide. Factor in the 'drilling rig bonus'.

Often when a woman begins working on a rig, the men won't talk to her for some time at all. Don't take it personally, but they are slightly scared themselves (though they will never admit it!). They won't know how to react to you, what they can say around you, how thick YOUR skin is...they know something will be different now that you are here but they don't know HOW that difference will play out.

Let them take the cues from you. You have power here - a power we as women never used to have, and that is the opportunity to set the tone of the conversation.

What is the drilling rig bonus? An amorphous measure that accepts that normal society is quite different to the microcosm that is the drilling rig and so your line might be different in this situation, or might need to be slightly different. Adjust accordingly.

Number 2.

Make the most of being underestimated.

Some of the rig workers may hold the unspoken belief that a woman is less competent or deserving of a role. We all know that is not the case, but use that underestimation to your benefit! Surprise them at being AWESOME at your job and letting your actions speak for themselves. Being really good at your job is a language they understand and WILL respect, particularly out there.

Number 3.

Have a sense of humour

Nothing breaks down barriers like a bit of laughter. Being witty, sharp, or deploying quick, timely ripsotes are always appreciated (but careful not to descend into bullying).

If you aren't a regular standup comedian, try to see the humour in the everyday interactions - because there is plenty. Personally, I am terrible at being witty but I find most everything hilarious. Nothing warms a hardened man's heart more than having a laugh at a joke he cracked

Number 4.

Learn the language.

There is nothing more effective than good communication. For the sake of mirth though, here are some of the phrases I have picked up (the ones used in polite company anyway!).

I'm drier than a dead dingo's donga.

You wana run with the big dogs you gotta pee in the long grass.

They thought I did what?! That's lower than the basic wage.

I'm like a mushroom. I get fed rubbish, everything just slides off me and I only come out in the dark.

Number 5.

Be Flexible, within limits. Don't forget your rights.

The guys working in the field will appreciate flexibility, humour and cues taken from you, as illustrated previously. A level of flexibility is required, as fighting every single battle is not only ineffective, it is exhausting.

However, you must also be cognizant of your rights as a woman and individual and if things DO go too far and they DO overstep the line, stop them. Use the tools necessary if required.

You might think it is a career limiter but rest assured, it is a career killer for the other individual. The law is on your side. If you are in a situation like this - talk to someone you trust, and then make a decision and don't ever feel guilty for the actions of others.

Number 6.

Always pack more sanitary items than you might think you need. You won't be able to buy any if you're stuck out in the middle of the desert or the ocean.

There's always one really practical survival tip in every guide. This is one of those. Trust me. Oh and a word of warning, the guys LOVE blaming any mood swings on our hormones. It's great.

Number 7.

Be your version of strong.

When I started out, I thought strong only meant masculine. I think that my time on the rigs has redefinined the relationships between masculinity, strength and what it means to be a strong, feminine woman. It means something different to everyone.

Now, for me, strength is in the fact that I can not only phsyically hold my own, but that I am not afraid of the men and the environment. Strength comes from knowing who I am and that I accept the fact that I am a woman in the industry and embrace it. Strength comes from knowing that I can choose to wear, dress, behave and speak how I please - whether that's rough or refined, the strength comes from knowing I have the power and gumption to make that choice.

Strength for you can mean any number of things, and I believe figuring that out is indeed strengthening in itself.

Number 8.

Enjoy the adventure!

Working as a female in a male dominated industry will always raise eyebrows and provoke questions.

Be ready for that. Decide whether this is something you want to *embrace* and talk about or whether it is something you would like to *ignore*.

Remember that no matter how much you ignore it, you still will be the odd one out. But that's not a terrible thing. If there are enough women that want to be the odd one out, soon the day will come when that is no longer the case.

Either way, I think it says a lot that we now have the CHOICE to to participate in this previously closed environment.

Be proud of who you are, and never apologise for it.

***

So what do you think?

The Problem with ‘Following your Passion’?

Source

I came across a curious article a little while ago that got me thinking about the tried and true adage of ‘following your passion’.

The early stages of a fantastic career might not feel fantastic at all, a reality that clashes with the fantasy world implied by the advice to "follow your passion" — an alternate universe where there's a perfect job waiting for you, one that you'll love right away once you discover it. It shouldn't be surprising that members of Generation Y demand a lot from their working life right away and are frequently disappointed about what they experience instead.

Written on the blog of the ever trusted Harvard Business Review by the author Cal Newport, the article points out that the concept of “following your passion” is essentially made synonymous with loving every second of your job and never settling for anything less.  Such a perception, it is argued, is inherently problematic due to a number of reasons, including the false promises it holds and perpetuates.

I am not going to deny that I am through and through Gen-Y and am proudly guilty of repeatedly telling people to follow their dreams, pursue their passion and find something they care about. 

I do see the point of Newport’s argument though, and he again highlights his point in this Forbes’ article.

Trying to determine your passion and follow it…can be dangerous and lead to chronic job-hopping. You’d be much better off…improving and stretching your “rare and valuable” skills to become a “craftsman.” That will make you a stronger job candidate and help you have a successful career.

It is an interesting perspective.  My father is incidentally a strong believer of the same concept: working on finding skills that are transferrable and get you employed rather than simply “for enjoyment”.  Doing your duty, fulfilling your responsibilities.  There are a couple of points I think this line of thinking poses. It should be noted that I am referring explicitly to career options and not general interests and hobbies.

I definitely think there is immeasurable value in enjoying what you do.  There is no point hating your job or role and being dissatisfied with your existence…after all, YOLO.  However I think it important that a distinction be made between blindly following a passion and forever having good and easy times. When framed like that, the important message of hard work is left out.

For example, no one can say to you engineering is an easy degree.  If they can, either they are a genius or they did it wrong. However, many engineers love engineering. 

How is that possible?

Through the realisation that perhaps loving something doesn’t instantly make it effortless (I understand that this is the same case in marriage, although I can’t speak with authority on that yet).

Whether or not everyone has a ‘calling’ is perhaps disputed, however there are definitely things people enjoy doing more than others.  Whether you find something you love first and try find the job to match it…or find something you don’t mind and learn to enjoy and appreciate it, both are equally valid ways of following a passion.  Sometimes the passion may come not from the industry itself but in mastering the challenge and becoming good at what you do.

Is the latter a “compromise”? If you had asked me a year ago, I may have said yes.  Now, having entered the working world, I am less adamant.

After all, Steve Jobs did the same thing.  The technology re-imaginer started as a barefoot liberal arts student and ended up the face of technological reinvention…through a series of serendipitous occurrences as well as becoming extremely passionate about what he was doing.

If a young Steve Jobs had taken his own advice and decided to only pursue work he loved, we would probably find him today as one of the Los Altos Zen Center's most popular teachers. But he didn't follow this simple advice. Apple Computer was decidedly not born out of passion, but instead was the result of a lucky break--a "small-time" scheme that unexpectedly took off.

Excerpted from So Good They Can't Ignore You by Cal Newport. © 2012 by Calvin C. Newport.

Not everyone is a Steve Jobs in the making, but his example is instructive.  The way in which we find a passion may vary.  Some are fortunate enough to know what they want to do their whole lives, others are less sure but that shouldn’t be derided.  I know I fell in love with motorsport and cars after watching a movie in grade 9…so sometimes inspiration strikes in the strangest of places.

At the end of the day, I am not going to stop telling people to follow their dreams and passions.  We are human beings, passion is a unique gift.  I personally think it is important to care; caring and passion often come hand in hand.  I am finding that over time, my focus of passion is shifting from particular ‘issues’ to more about values that the issues embody, such as empowerment and equality (and in the case of racing cars, pure speeeeeed). 

However, in doing so, I will suffix the message with a disclaimer that simply because it is a passion, it won’t always be sunshine and rainbows.  Hard yards are required, although isn’t that what makes an outcome worthwhile?

…and those who haven’t found a passion yet, don’t despair.  It is not always a lightening bolt that strikes overnight; sometimes passion comes in the form of stalactites and stalagmites – they never really mean to grow, but grow they do; ever so slowly, drip by drip just doing their thing, until one day someone visits and the realisation dawns that something truly beautiful has been created.

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Women in the East, Women in the West: Finding the middle ground.

Have you ever had your fundamental beliefs about your role in society challenged?

I never thought it would be so…confusing.

Having recently returned from a four month stint in Sudan, I have been trying to reconcile what I saw and experienced there with my experience growing up in Australia as an Aussie chick.  I think I am still figuring it all out…

I never really considered myself a true victim of the “identity crisis” issues that were said to plague first and second generation migrants that make Australia their home.  I considered myself ‘Straylian through and through, from the way I talked and thought, to my mates and sports of choice (except for cricket…soccer girl all the way).  I loved the fact that I could walk into a pump shop at a mine site in central Queensland as a hijabi-wearing-Sudanese-born gal and instantly relate to the old mates working maintenance because, well, I grew up here. This was my country, these were my people.

I felt comfortable with the choices I had made: my degree and career (mechanical engineer, pretty butch), my sport (boxing: yup, as feminine as they come) and the belief that my gender played no part in the role I was to play in society.  My mantra was pretty much “well if the boys can do it, I can do it too”.  My father was naturally horrified, but hid it well and mostly accepted that was who I had become.

Boy, was I in for a treat when I got to Sudan.

My first month was…interesting.  Not because of the heat, or the conditions or the lack of system…but because of the cultural expectations that were placed on me that I just wasn’t accustomed to.  I understood and accepted the bare bones of it all (after all, my parents brought me up as a Sudanese woman), but what frustrated me was the clear discrepancy between the roles of men and women and the unwritten rules that I was expected to adhere to.

Sport was a big one – my grandmother couldn’t understand why I wanted to train on the local track, competed with my uncle in pushups or was so interested in exercise.   It wasn’t even the obviously masculine things that were different: Apparently the way I walked, sat, talked, laughed…the issues I wanted to debate (politics isn’t for women!) and the interests that I had were all unfeminine and undesirable in a respectable Sudanese woman. 

I used to joke to my aunt: “Someone should write a rule book on “How to live life as a Sudanese woman” so I don’t keep putting my foot in it and doing the wrong thing”

She would just laugh.  “This is how it is here…”

At first, I found it funny.   I loved being the odd one out, flying in the face of what was acceptable, just being me.  Then it began to frustrate me.  Why was I being judged on things that had nothing to do with my true character? Why weren’t my cousins fighting for their rights as women!

It isn’t as if my cousins were “oppressed”.  Hardly.  My cousins are all studying or working and my aunts all have higher degrees.  Their English is great and they are all well educated and well read.  In fact, one aunt is running one of the biggest businesses in Sudan!  So the opportunity for women to do things is there. Yet… I still couldn’t understand how the women were living with such cultural restrictions.

My cousin shed some light on her perspective one night and said something that I had never considered before.

“It is so cool that you are travelling and doing all this stuff and seeing the world Yassmina, but that is your world.  You have to accept what we have accepted that this is our world and we have to operate in it.  It’s not as bad as you think! We know what we have to do and the role we have to play to be a good woman, a good wife, a good Sudanese and a good Muslim, so we do that.  We don’t want to make our lives harder by looking for things that we don’t really need…”

My aunt echoed a similar sentiment.  “You might look at me and say woah, she has a degree but she is sitting at home taking care of the house, how oppressed is she!  But I love doing this! I love taking care of the house, cooking and being there for my family, and many others do as well.  I work [she has a teaching job], but I work hours that will suit the family because at the end of the day, the family is most important.  You might disagree Yassmina, but the woman is better suited to bringing up a family; you can’t have a home without a mother…and I am happy to fill that role”.

Hold up! I thought.  Yes, there were some societal inequalities that women had issues with and were wanting to have resolved…but by and large they were happy with the role they were playing in life? They **wanted** to be caregivers and homemakers? Wait…does this mean our entire definition of success differs? Huh? Didn’t they want to be liberated?

Yikes.  Now I was confused and I began to wonder…

Maybe there is some validity in the way my family see the role of a woman. Maybe it is too crazy for me to expect a man to have an equal share in the housework. Maybe, as a woman, I have to think about my role as a procreator and a homemaker as just as, if not more important, than my career…

If you know me at all, you would know those thoughts are truly at odds with how I tend to see the world.

There is another aspect to it too, one that I haven’t talked about here, and that is how the women see it as their Islamic duty to be the caregivers and the homemakers.  This was harder for me to deal with, because I don’t have the scholarly Islamic knowledge to confidently refute what they were saying.

So I reached a point where I was at a loss.

Do I forget about everything I saw and learnt in Sudan and continue living life the way I had been in Australia, with gender not being a factor in my decisions because “that’s how I grew up”? 

Or, do I follow the path described by my cultural background, where all my decisions are largely based on gender and gender roles… because that is “where I am from?”

I had – and sometimes still have – difficulty reconciling what I grew up with and what my background encourages. The thing is, I think the expected role of a Sudanese woman in society is at odds with the expected role as an Australian woman in society.

How does one deal with that?

***

I guess for me, I think I am beginning to realise that the idea that “women can have it all” is fair enough, but perhaps for me should be amended to “women can have whatever they want”.  If they want the house and kids that’s great, and if they want the career that is within their rights as well.  Having it all at the same time though… that might be a little more difficult.

I don’t have a concrete answer to my mental dilemma just yet. All I do know is that I feel there needs to be a middle ground, and that is the one that I choose to take, inshallah. A path that takes into account that I am a woman, but that doesn’t limit my choices, it informs them.

If there is one thing I took away from the trip, it is this: It is important, as a woman, to recognise that if (and inshallah when) you choose to have a family, the role as a mother is invaluable and cannot be substituted… and that gender does play a factor in the family dynamic, whether we like it or not.

***

How it will all play out and how much will I take from that lesson? I guess only time will tell…

What about you? How do you see the role of women in society? Have you ever had your views so challenged?

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