“It’s only a problem if she wants it to be” an ethnographic exploration of gender in the maritime sector

This thesis explores how gender identity and presentation shape people’s experience of physical and sonic environments in a workplace, with a specific focus on male-dominated professions in the maritime sector. Men continue to outnumber women in these professional spaces, despite training and recruiting programs encouraging women to join. Why women choose this line of work, and how they create room for themselves in professional spaces not designed for them, are the primary foci of this work. Original research centres on interviews with 19 participants from fishing, fish processing, marine engineering, naval architecture, and the oil and gas industry, supplemented by participant observation. Feminist standpoint theory frames the analysis, with Ruth Frankenburg’s work on positionality and perspective and Judith M. Gerson and Kathy Peiss’ work on gender consciousness and gender awareness offering insight into how gender shapes physical space in historically male-dominated spaces. Rebecca Lentjes’ work on sonic patriarchy and Robin E. Sheriff’s concept of cultural censorship are used to investigate how sonic spaces are shaped by the gender of those speaking and those who are silenced. The narratives included in this work, and the analysis used to explore them, suggest that the challenges and barriers these women face are part of a larger cultural pattern within the maritime sector that must be that must be addressed in order to achieve gender equity in the workplace.