POLITICAL INTELLIGENCE
TEXAS OIL
Harassed in the Field
WITH STUNNING PRECISION, SARA SAIDMAN, AN OIL FIELD engineer, can still recall the moment that “set the tone for the rest of my employment at Schlumberger,” a Texas-based oil field services company.
Saidman took a job at Schlumberger in 2016 because the company had a reputation for being the best in the industry. In her first week of working at a New Mexico drilling site, Saidman was sitting on a couch near her trainer, Leslie Bullard, a large woman with a thick West Texas accent. Bullard slid her hand down Saidman’s left knee, onto her thigh, and grabbed her vagina, Saidman says. Saidman bolted into her bedroom and hid under her covers for the rest of the night. Bullard declined to comment.
“There was no shaking what just happened,” Saidman says. “She was in charge of my promotion, and I couldn’t even get away because we shared a bedroom.” At the time, Saidman was a 21-year-old woman surrounded by mostly male co-workers twice her age. A co-worker told her that speaking up about sexual harassment tanked women’s careers in the oil field, so she didn’t report the incident.
While some female oil field workers have come forward publicly with sexual harassment claims or lawsuits against their respective companies, many of the nearly dozen oil field workers the Observer spoke to say the #MeToo movement has yet to hit the oil industry. While men can also be victims of sexual assault, female oil workers say sexual harassment against women is prevalent because of the high percentage of men in the industry, lax management, and poor handling of harassment claims. A University of Massachusetts study found that, between 2012 and 2016, the oil and gas industry had the highest rate of sexual harassment claims filed by women with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. About half of the cases they studied didn’t list a specific industry, however.
Women interviewed for this story say they have experienced groping, catcalling, persistent sexual badgering, and crude texts while working in the oil field. Many say their harassers were mostly male supervisors who consistently spoke to asked to remain anonymous out of fear of retaliation.
