Yassmin Abdel—Magied explains how she once hated feminism and how the Deepwater Horison disaster could have been avoided

MUSLIM activist Yassmin Abdel-Magied has told of how she once hated feminism, and why the famous Deepwater Horizon disaster could have been avoided with diversity.

CONTROVERSIAL Muslim activist Yassmin Abdel-Magied has told of how she once hated feminism, saying she thought it was “for chicks who can’t handle jokes”.

Ms Abdel-Magied, a former mechanical engineer, told Australia’s oil and gas executives that she embraced the idea of diversity only after she worked on rigs in Queensland and Western Australia, The Australianreports.

“I hated the idea of feminism, I was like, ‘feminism is for chicks who can’t handle jokes’,” she said.

“I thought people who kept talking about diversity and inclusion were people that studied arts. They weren’t engineers. It wasn’t until I went into the industry and I saw the reality that I actually started to think, maybe this a thing I should care about.”

She said that the oil and gas sector made it harder for “a young, brown Muslim woman” — to succeed.

“So I pretended to be a middle-aged white bloke,“ she said.

“I was undoing myself, I was undoing my gender, I was undoing my cultural heritage.”

The Australianalso reports that she gave executives her theory on how the Deepwater Horizon disaster could’ve been avoided.

Great Tuesday morning #appea2017 presentation by former #oilandgas engineer Yassmin Abdel-Magied on diversity and inclusion pic.twitter.com/9SziBJh3x2

— APPEA Comms (@APPEAComms) May 16, 2017

Ms Abdel-Magied suggested that if those making the decisions around it had been from more diverse backgrounds, it could have been avoided.

“Everyone around the table came from a similar world and a similar perspective. They all thought the same. They all cared about the same things. And so we ended with one of the worst tragedies in our industry,” she said.

“And I often wonder, if there was someone around that table who was different, who thought differently but was valued as equally as everybody else, who could challenge that groupthink and challenge that confirmation bias, would things have ended differently?”

Ms Abdel-Magied was speaking at the annual APPEA conference in Perth, after she recently escaped being sacked from her current job on the Council for Australian-Arab Relations after an investigation by Foreign Minister Julie Bishop.

The Sudan-born activist was investigated after she posted “LEST. WE. FORGET. (Manus, Nauru, Syria, Palestine ...)” on Facebook on Anzac Day. She deleted her comment after she was attacked on social media.

Ms Bishop found no basis for removing her over controversial remarks, despite several MPs calling for her to be removed from the role.

Ms Abdel-Magied also came under fire earlier this year after she attracted controversy in February by telling the ABC’s Q&A program that she believed Islam was “the most feminist religion”.

Originally published as Yassmin Abdel—Magied explains how she once hated feminism and how the Deepwater Horison disaster could have been avoided