{"id":70012,"date":"2021-03-09T11:30:50","date_gmt":"2021-03-09T11:30:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/grist.org\/?p=500408"},"modified":"2021-03-09T11:30:50","modified_gmt":"2021-03-09T11:30:50","slug":"oil-companies-want-you-to-think-theyre-feminist-its-bs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2021\/03\/09\/oil-companies-want-you-to-think-theyre-feminist-its-bs\/","title":{"rendered":"Oil companies want you to think they\u2019re feminist. It\u2019s BS."},"content":{"rendered":"

Monday was International Women\u2019s Day, and oil companies want you to know \u2014 they\u2019re feminists, too! Shell<\/a>, Chevron<\/a>, and even the American Petroleum Institute<\/a>, the oil industry\u2019s biggest lobbying group, posted messages about the importance of women in the oil and gas industry. \u201cHere\u2019s to the women making a difference at Chevron,\u201d tweeted the Chevron account.<\/p>\n

Symbolic gestures of corporate solidarity are nothing new for the oil and gas industry. Last year, in a particularly cringe-worthy commemoration of International Women\u2019s Day, one Shell gas station run by two women temporarily added an apostrophe to its logo, becoming She\u2019ll<\/a>. The stunt quickly became the object of Twitter mockery (\u201cmore women gas pumps!\u201d said one user<\/a>). Last summer, Shell, BP, and Chevron similarly released statements<\/a> against racism, declaring themselves allies of the Black Lives Matter movement.<\/p>\n

Many of the oil companies’ recent posts allude to their inclusion of women in the workforce; the Canadian oil magnate Enbridge, for example, pointed to its goal of having 40 percent women in the workplace and on the board of directors by 2025, while Shell tweeted an article highlighting women in positions of power at the company. But oil companies\u2019 claims to anti-racism or feminism ring hollow — even with women at the helm — when the effects of oil and gas extraction and climate change fall disproportionately on women, particularly women of color.<\/p>\n

For instance, women make up 80 percent of people<\/a> displaced by climate change, according to the United Nations. Women are more likely to die in extreme weather events<\/a>, including heat waves, according to studies on France, China, and India, and in tropical cyclones, according to studies on Bangladesh and the Philippines. Climate change is also tied to pregnancy risks — people exposed to higher temperatures<\/a> or air pollution from fracking<\/a> are more likely to have underweight, stillborn, or preterm babies, with Black and Hispanic pregnant people experiencing the worst impacts.<\/p>\n

Hurricane Katrina, which struck New Orleans in 2005, is a case study in how natural disasters hit women hardest. A study<\/a> by the Institute for Women\u2019s Policy Research found that recovery policies following the storm ignored the needs of Black women<\/a>, resulting in displacement. Extreme weather<\/a> has been linked to violence against women, and that was similarly the case after Katrina, when women experienced higher rates of rape<\/a> and violence<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Oil and gas infrastructure is also tied to gender-based and sexual violence. Company-owned housing for fossil fuel workers known as \u201cman camps\u201d are well-documented sites of sexual assault<\/a> and trafficking<\/a>, and is one of the factors linked to<\/a> the epidemic<\/a> of missing and murdered<\/a> Indigenous women. In a letter<\/a> to President Biden urging the cancellation of the Keystone XL and Line 3 pipelines, Indigenous women leaders wrote, \u201cWe still have daughters, aunties, mothers, cousins, and two-spirit relatives who have never been found and whose perpetrators have never been brought to justice.\u201d<\/p>\n

The irony is particularly stark when you consider that International Women\u2019s Day originated out of a radical, anti-capitalist political movement<\/a> meant to highlight the insecurities faced by women workers. While oil companies celebrate milestones of installing women in leadership positions with cutesy tweets, women around the world continue to suffer assault, displacement, and death due to the effects of oil extraction. All the hashtags in the world can\u2019t erase that.<\/p>\n

This story was originally published by Grist<\/a> with the headline Oil companies want you to think they’re feminist. It’s BS.<\/a> on Mar 9, 2021.<\/p>\n

This post was originally published on Grist<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Big Oil’s tweets rang hollow on International Women’s Day.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1251,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[108,118],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70012"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1251"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=70012"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70012\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":70013,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70012\/revisions\/70013"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=70012"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=70012"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=70012"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}