Yassmin fires up: disaster caused by lack of diversity

Yassmin Abdel-Magied tells oil and gas executives that the Deepwater Horizon disaster could have been avoided.

Yassmin Abdel-Magied speaking at the APPEA conference in Perth on the topic of “diversity and inclusion”. Picture: Ray Cash

Muslim activist Yassmin Abdel-Magied has suggested the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster in 2010 could have been avoided if executives from the companies responsible had been drawn from more diverse backgrounds.

Addressing hundreds of delegates at a conference in Perth yesterday, the 26-year-old former mechanical engineer cited the Gulf of Mexico spill to urge more gender and cultural diversity among directors and senior management of male-dominated oil and gas companies.

She also confessed to “hating” feminism until two years ago when she came to recognise the barriers that made it difficult for people such as her — “a young, brown Muslim woman” — to succeed in the male-dominated industry.

Her comments came after she attracted controversy in February by telling the ABC’s Q&A program that she believed Islam was “the most feminist religion”.

Fire boats battle the off shore oil rig at Deepwater Horizon in 2010.

The Sudan-born activist was speaking yesterday during a panel discussion at the Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association’s annual conference on the topic of “diversity and inclusion”.

She said behavioural scientists had attributed the explosion on the BP-operated Deepwater Horizon rig to groupthink and confirmation bias among key ­decision-makers in the lead up to the explosion that killed 11 ­people.

Yassmin Abdel-Magied at the conference. Picture: Ray Cash

“Was there anyone else around the table who thought differently and who didn’t just think differently, but was included enough and was valued enough so their different perspective was valued, to actually challenge that bias?” she said.

“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.

“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?”

In 2014, the US District Court ruled that BP acted with “gross negligence” and made “profit-driven decisions” during the drilling that led to the blowout.

Swiss-based drilling rig owner Transocean and Houston-based contractor Halliburton Energy Services were also found partly responsible.

FYI I'm a qualified mechanical engineer and spent years on oil rigs as an MWD + a wellsite engineer. Bowen/Surat/Cooper Basin + offshore NWS

— Yassmin Abdel-Magied (@yassmin_a) May 16, 2017

Yesterday, Ms Abdel-Magied said she had not begun to ­embrace diversity until two years ago when she broke into the oil and gas industry, working on rigs in Queensland and Western Australia.

“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 is a thing I should care about.” Ms Abdel-Magied said after gaining a job as an engineer, she had no idea how to act because she “had no one to show me what it was like to be a successful woman on a rig”.

“So I pretended to be a ­middle-aged white bloke,” she said to laughter, describing how she would swear and swagger like her male colleagues until she ­realised this was “reinforcing the existing culture”.

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

Ms Abdel-Magied said while surveys had shown that 80 per cent of Australians favoured multiculturalism, most believed migrants should fit in rather than embrace differences.

“Multiculturalism means you rock up, you leave everything about yourself at the door and you become one of us,” she said.

“It’s a melting pot. You’re going to melt into this pot where everyone’s the same. That’s not actually how you get the most out of diversity.”

The Deepwater Horizon oil rig burns in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010.