This study contributes to the empirical evidence in the area of gendered organizations (Martin and Collinson, 2002) and their effects on the women who work in them through an interpretive, ethnographic analysis of the oil industry in Canada, specifically Alberta. The study combines data from interviews with women professionals who have extensive employment experience in the industry, a historical analysis of the industry's development in the area and the personal contextual experience of the author. It is suggested that there are three primary processes which structure the masculinity of the industry: everyday interactions which exclude women; values and beliefs specific to the dominant occupation of engineering which reinforce gender divisions; and a consciousness derived from the powerful symbols of the frontier myth and the romanticized cowboy hero. In this dense cultural web of masculinities, the strategies that the women developed to survive, and, up to a point, to thrive, are double-edged in that they also reinforced the masculine system, resulting in short-term individual gains and an apparently long-term failure to change the masculine values of the industry.

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This paper reports on an exploratory study into the extent of diversity management initiatives in organizations in one Canadian city. Diversity management originated in the USA where it is reportedly being embraced by many organizations and where it has become the basis of a large consulting business. Although a diverse workforce and workplace diversity management are often argued to be critical to organizational competitiveness, little is known about how Canadian organizations are reacting.

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