TY  - CHAP
AB  - Abstract Professional careers have become more precarious in recent decades. Corporations today engage in downsizing even during profitable times, a practice that impacts workers throughout the labor force, including those with advanced degrees. Using a case study of women geoscientists in the oil and gas industry, I investigate how the increasing precariousness of professional careers reinforces gender inequality. The compressed cycle of booms and busts in the oil and gas industry permits an investigation into how women fare in precarious professional jobs. Extending gendered organization theory, I argue that three mechanisms are built into professional careers today that enhance women’s vulnerability to layoffs: teamwork, career maps, and networking. I illustrate how these mechanisms disadvantage women with in-depth portraits of three geoscientists who lost their jobs during the recent downturn in oil prices. Their personal narratives, collected over a 3-year period of boom and bust, reveal how a particular multinational corporation is structured in ways that favor the white men who dominate their industry. The rhetoric of diversity obscures the workings of gendered organizations during good times, but when times get tough, management’s decisions about whom to lay off belies the routine practices the reproduce men’s advantages within the industry.
VL  - 31
SN  - 978-1-78743-288-8, 978-1-78743-287-1/0277-2833
DO  - 10.1108/S0277-283320170000031007
UR  - https://doi.org/10.1108/S0277-283320170000031007
AU  - Williams Christine L.
ED  - Arne L. Kalleberg
ED  - Steven P. Vallas
PY  - 2017
Y1  - 2017/01/01
TI  - The Gender of Layoffs in the Oil and Gas Industry
T2  - Precarious Work
T3  - Research in the Sociology of Work
PB  - Emerald Publishing Limited
SP  - 215
EP  - 241
Y2  - 2024/04/24
ER  -