Experiences of Female Long-Distance Labour Commuters from Kelowna to the Oil Fields of Alberta
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study explores the challenges faced by female long distance commuters from Kelowna, British Columbia, when working in the oilfields of Wood Buffalo, Alberta—specifically, how they reinforce, resist, or reconcile tensions of gender within the male-dominated resource extraction workforce. Data from a survey of nine women and five semi-structured interviews with female resource extraction workers indicate that high wages motivated them to take up long distance commuting while social ties, homeownership and environmental attractions tethered them to Kelowna and the Okanagan area. The most apparent barrier for women is the almost insurmountable challenge of accommodating motherhood with long distance commuting. As workers, the study participants faced disparaging judgments about their knowledge and competence, even in cases where the participant held a higher-rank and had extensive work experience. The women used various avoidant strategies to minimize exposure to sexist comments or behavior that made them uncomfortable. The paper focuses on how the discourses of neoliberal ideology and hegemonic masculinities influenced women’s perceptions of gender-related tensions at work. Individualism, competition and concerns over job security all affected women’s assessments of workplace-related harm and views of each other as well as their male co-workers. The women simultaneously experienced and reinforced marginalization at work through gender stereotypes of both men and women; they revealed a perplexing combination of sensitivity to sexist treatment and strong reluctance to complain about harassment or gender discrimination. Recommendations to ameliorate women’s working conditions and thus their integration into the labour force are noted. Keywords: female mobile workers; oil industry; long-distance labour commuting; resource extraction industry; Kelowna ----------------------------------------- Experiences des travailleuses faisant la navette longue distance entre Kelowna et les champs de petrole de l'Alberta Cette etude qualitative explore certains des defis auxquels font face les femmes qui font la navette longue distance de Kelowna, en Colombie-Britannique, lorsqu'elles travaillent dans les champs petroliferes de Wood Buffalo, en Alberta - en particulier, comment elles renforcent, resistent ou reconcilient les tensions entre les genres au sein de la main-d'œuvre d'extraction des ressources dominees par les hommes. Les donnees, basees sur des questionnaires d'auto-evaluation de neuf travailleuses de l'extraction des ressources et des entretiens semi-structures avec un sous-ensemble de cinq femmes, indiquent que les salaires eleves les ont motivees a entreprendre de longs trajets tandis que les liens sociaux, la propriete et les attractions environnementales les ont attaches a Kelowna et la region de l'Okanagan. L’obstacle le plus apparent pour les femmes est le defi presque insurmontable d’accommoder la maternite avec les trajets longue distance. En tant que travailleuses, les participantes a l'etude ont fait face a des jugements desobligeants sur leurs connaissances et leurs competences, meme dans les cas ou la participante detenait un grade superieur et avait une vaste experience de travail. Les femmes ont utilise diverses strategies d'evitement pour minimiser l'exposition aux commentaires ou comportements sexistes qui les mettaient mal a l'aise. L'article se concentre sur la facon dont les discours sur l'ideologie neoliberale et les masculinites hegemoniques ont influence les perceptions des femmes au sujet des tensions liees au genre au travail. L’individualisme, la concurrence et les preoccupations sur la securite de l’emploi sont tous des facteurs qui ont affecte les evaluations des femmes concernant les prejudices lies au lieu de travail et les opinions mutuelles ainsi que celles de leurs collegues masculins, sur le lieu de travail. Les femmes ont simultanement connu et renforce la marginalisation au travail a travers les stereotypes de genre des hommes et des femmes; elles ont revele une combinaison apparemment deroutante de sensibilite au traitement sexiste et de forte reticence a se plaindre de harcelement ou de discrimination fondee sur le sexe. Des recommandations visant a ameliorer les conditions de travail des femmes et donc leur integration dans la population active sont notees. Mots-cles: Travailleuses mobiles, industrie petroliere, travail a longue distance, industrie de l'extraction des ressources, Kelowna
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".