Hide feminity, dress in masculinity. Women operators in the chemical industry in tarragona, spain

Abstract

The industrial sector continues to be a strongly masculine working environment, both because men continue to be the majority in number and because masculinity is still the fundamental logic in their productive processes. This article analyzes the current situation, in which the women workers, although they are a minority, have been participating in this work environment for years. Specifically, the analysis focuses on the level of informal relationships in the workplace to understand the role that gender maintains in this work environment. With this objective, this is a case study of the chemical pole of Tarragona, the most important one in southern Europe, where the female work force currently stands at 15%. The study is specifically focused on the level of plant operators, the basic jobs of the industry, from which the chemical process is controlled in situ. For qualitative research, 14 interviews were conducted with women who perform this work analyzed through a constructivist gender perspective. The investigation methodology in which this thesis is framed is the action research, so the results presented here have also been returned to the informants in discussion groups for debate and improvement. The main result of this article is that, despite the growing female participation in the field of the chemical industry, the relationship dynamics are still marked by masculinity. Although the entry of the women took place some twenty years ago, resistance continues to be detected by the workers at the entrance of the women. These resistances are transferred to the identity plane of women, who experience a certain contradiction between being a woman and being part of the team of operators. All this makes it necessary for women to develop day-to-day strategies in this work environment, in which they use gender tools. To better incorporate themselves into this work environment, women develop matching strategies despite being individual, disguising elements of femininity, while "dressing" with masculine elements. This is how they try to escape the negative hypervisibility that femininity has in this work environment. Through this research, the importance of informal relationships at work as a space of domination is put on the table. Its daily management, according to the results, supposes an extra load of emotional work and stress that falls on women.