Invisible no more: women’s work in the oil and gas industry

The oil and gas industry is generally imagined as a prototypical ‘men’s world’, with the multifaceted work women have performed largely invisible. This is being rectified by growing research on women workers in the industry. This paper introduces this literature and calls for further research into how women have enabled but also challenged the industry, and how gendered arrangements of work and family have been constitutive of it. The paper draws on the example of The Royal Dutch Shell Group of Companies to highlight women’s contributions and experiences in three roles, as graduates, housewives, and domestic workers. The paper argues that 1) women’s work as much as its relegation to the private sphere and positioning as lesser or not work are constitutive of the industry; 2) women never constituted a homogeneous group, as intersecting inequalities of class, nationality, and racialisation further shaped their positioning and often-ambivalent relationship with the corporation; 3) not only labour regimes in the oil industry but also its archive are deeply gendered, necessitating the opening up of corporate archives, as well as methodological plurality.