The Cost of BP's Boys' Club: Why the Oil Industry's Macho Culture Is Bad for Women and the Environment | Environment | AlterNet

The Cost of BP's Boys' Club: Why the Oil Industry's Macho Culture Is Bad for Women and the Environment | Environment | AlterNet

"We can begin to understand the tendency toward machismo in BP with simple numbers: all of BP's executives are white males, except for one female HR leader. Our research has shown this to be short-sighted. Countless studies have demonstrated that diversity in leadership produces better results overall. Women also tend to be more tempered risk-takers, which, among other things, could have shifted BP's decision not to use a safeguard device on the Deepwater rig, a potentially disaster-averting move that could have cost as little as $500,000.

Calls for more diverse leadership are certainly being listened to in Washington, as the leaders dispatched to deal with the spill are largely female. They include U.S. Homeland Security's Janet Napolitano, Carol Browner, the assistant to the president for Energy and Climate Change, Dr. Jane Lubchenco, administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) administrator Lisa Jackson, who has organized aircraft in the area to gather information on air quality.

Women represent some of the most vulnerable communities impacted by the spill, both financially and physically. In times of emergency, it is the most vulnerable communities, particularly low-income households, frequently headed by single women, who risk the most in these kinds of emergencies"

This makes me even madder. For forty years I have been fighting for a job in science, or engineering. I had classmates, parents, co-workers, supervisors, and professors tell me to my face that girls can not do engineering. The Equal Opportunity laws are a joke. The Gulf is destroyed! People don't seem to be getting that. They think in a couple of years or a couple of decades that it will come back. Those lies are going to hurt this situation worse than covering up a few dead birds.

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